On Forces in Governing Earth Systems

　　

　　------The methodology on strengthening the power of UN

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　Fen Wang

　　

　　

　　

　　To my mother: The Earth!

　　

　　

　　To citizens of one world!

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　“大道之行，天下为公，选贤与能，讲信修睦。故人不独亲其亲，不独子其子。使老有所终，壮有所用，幼有所长；矜寡、孤独、废疾者皆有所养；男有分，女有归；货，恶其弃于地也，不必藏于己；力，恶其不出于身也，不必为己。是故谋闭而不兴，盗窃乱贼而不作，故外户而不闭。是谓大同”

　　

　　“以天下为一家，以中国为一人”. 《礼记·礼运》Confucius“远人不服，则修文德以来之……”《论语·季氏》

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　©Earth Citizen: Fen Wang; Contact: [email protected]

　　

　　Content

　　

　　

　　

　　Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………….

　　Abstract………………………………………………………………………………...

　　Chapter 1-Introduction…………………………………………………………………   

　　      1.1Background……………………………………………………………………..

　　           1.1.1 NGOs and Civil Society………………………………………………….

　　           1.1.2 UNFCCC: a step in Governing Earth Climate…………………………...

　　      1.2 Hypothesis……………………………………………………………………..

　　      1.3 Aim and Research Questions………………………………………………….

　　           1.3.1 Aim………………………………………………………………………

　　           1.3.2 Research Questions……………………………………………………….

　　           1.3.3 Methodology…………………………………………………………….

　　Chapter 2-Theory……………………………………………………………………...

　　       2.1 Diversity and Concept of NGOs……………………………………………...

　　       2.2 Political arena and power striving……………………………………………

　　       2.3 Evolution of Green movement……………………………………….............

　　       2.4 Governing Earth Systems…………………………………………………….

　　       2.5 Reformism and Radicalism…………………………………………………...

　　Chapter 3-Argument, Analysis and Discussion……………………………………….

　　       3.1 NGOs’exerting influence on society…………………………………………

　　       3.2 The Application of the Law of Contradictions and Unification………………

　　       3.3 On Metabolism………………………………………………………………..

　　Chapter 4-Discussion in a larger context………………………………………………

　　       4.1 NGOs, Civil Society and International Governance………………………….

　　       4.2 UN centered IOs and Earth System Governance……………………………..

　　       4.3 International Regimes and Global Governance………………………………

　　Chapter 5-Conclusion…………………………………………………………………

　　       5.1Fundamental driving force for earth system governance phenomena…………

　　       5.2Interrelationships between NGOs, UN centered IOs, Civil Society, states…..

　　       5.3Consequences of a stronger global NGO network system……………………

　　       5.4 Other findings………………………………………………………………...

　　       5.5Reflections and Recommendations………………………………………………..

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　Acknowledgements

　　

　　I would love to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to those kind people along with me during the past times of knowledge exploration trip. Firstly, I want to say thanks for that I have had this great opportunity to study in this wonderful Programme with so many wonderful study mates from all across the world and so many friendly and enthusiastic teachers, where I learned a lot of inter and transdisciplinary knowledge and where I obtained lots of valuable comments and inspirations. I want to say great thanks to my dear supervisor and friend Ph. D Ola Uhrqvist (who has a very good sense of humor) for his patience and being very responsible in supervising me during this study, for which I am always indebted; I want to say thanks to Professor Björn-Ola Linnér, Johan Hedrén (philosopher) and Mathias Friman for their guiding me into the exploration of UNFCCC during those lectures; I want to say great thanks to Professor Bo Svensson (who is a very open and kind), Professor Jan-Olof Drangert (who is very responsible for the students and also encouraged me to study deeper of NGO phenomenon) for their being so nice in every aspects, I can never thank them enough. I want to say thanks to my dear teacher Karin Tonderski (who has special talent in discovering students’ ‘real’ interest) for her suggesting me to study in the Programme of sustainable development, from whom the suggestion together with the guiding will continue benefiting my whole life. I also want to take this opportunity to say my heart-felt gratitude to Karin Tonderski, Tomas Otby, Monica Ungerholm, Anders Hargeby, and Christina Hammarstedt for their compassion, help and caring when I lost everything in the luggage in summer of 2007. I want to say thanks to Anders Hargeby, Anders Gothenburg, for their supervising in those ecology courses and the wonderful time spent together with their families during those Christmas days. My heart-felt gratitude to Alexander Mossland and Threse Björck and their families for their being such kind to me, their help is unforgettable. I also want to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Professor Zhang Luqiang and MS. Zhen Huili for their teaching and guiding me like my parents the past years, the influence from whom has been already planted in my heart. My gratitude also goes to my student Johannes Järvinen and his family for those nice gatherings and conversations. My thanks also go to Midgård for providing me an ‘office’ where I read a lot of inspiring books the past two years. The direct comments from Hans Biertil, Michael, Yaser Rezania, Fredrik la Fleur, Kwasi Frimpong are all very precious to me, I hereby say thanks to all of them. My thanks hereby also go to Emelie Åkerblom, Matt Meyer, Sara Gudmundson, Björn Johansson, Torbjörn Säterberg, Zamda Mandari, Daniela Matysiak for those wonderful times spent together. There are so many more people that I want to say thanks to, but due to the limited space I can’t list them all, but their names are always remembered.

　　

　　God bless these wonderful people from all over the world and God bless the Earth!

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　On Forces in Governing Earth Systems

　　

　　------The methodology on strengthening the power of UN

　　

　　

　　By Fen Wang

　　               

　　ABSTRACT:

　　

　　The law of contradictions and unification was applied in observing and interpreting the NGOs, civil society, IOs and IGOs phenomena, in understanding the relationship between these forces and natural systems, climate governance, Earth system governance. According to the dialectics approach and drawing the insights from that social movements within civil society have transformative potential to the evolving world society, which together indicate that a new form of integrative and holistic ‘earth government’ will be evolved out over the coming decades; And for the sake of saving the humanity and the Earth, governing both the societal and natural forces will be necessary, and to speed up this process, reforming the present international systems will be a historical choice.

　　

　　KEY WORDS:

　　

　　NGOs, Civil Society, International Organizations (IOs), UNFCCC, UN, Reform, Cosmopolitanism, Climate Change, Sustainable Development, Green Movement, NGO Diplomacy, Contradictions and Unification, Metabolism, Global Democracy, Torbjörn Tännsjö, Earth System Governance, Frank Biermann, Global Governance, Oran Young, Reformism and Radicalism.

　　

　　

　　Chapter 1-Introduction

　　

　　All the phenomena that appear in this planet is largely based on previous people’s thoughts, ideology and visions, since man can shape nature purposely according to its demand, desire which shapes the nature more suitable for the man’s living (Xiao, 2005, p22). Man’s lifestyles determines all kinds of anthropogenic activities which have huge influence on the nature, therefore changing people’s thoughts is the fundamental approach to transform people’s lifestyles and only when the harmonious lifestyle patterns are realized will the human society be set at a sustainable pace (Ding 2005).

　　

　　1.1 Background

　　

　　The present large context is that we humans are indeed in an era of unprecedented global environmental change: climate change, biodiversity losses, water scarcity, energy scarcity, a global food crisis (Folke and Rockström, 2009), melting glaciers more frequent natural disasters (IPCC). UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) outlined the following key environmental concerns facing the humanity in our 21st century, namely, record levels of ozone depletion, deforestation at a rate of 16.1 million hectares annually, degradation of more than half of the world’s major rivers, land degradation caused billions of tones of fertile topsoil a year (UNEP, 2002), when the cumulative impact of these issues in conjunction with the issues mentioned above the situation that we humanity face now and the future is very dire. Humans started facing environmental issues in 1960s, the Stockholm Conference was a milestone in our dealing with these issues, “The 1972 Stockholm conference was identified by a number of scholars and practitioners as an important catalyst for bringing international political attention to the environmental issues, and stimulating international environmental protection and mobilization” (Linnér et al., 2003). NGOs’ participating in Stockholm Conference can be regarded as initiating a trend of engagement of NGOs in international conferences (Nilsson, 2003 and Engfeldt, 2009). Afterwards the emerging NGOs have become a conspicuous phenomenon, a rising green dragon in shaping the international landscape (the increasing pace of global change and commonality in causes and effects, geopolitical rearrangement and their impacts on global governance, e.g. USA, China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, Middle East), will NGOs and civil society able to change faces of new global realities? Let us start exploring together!

　　

　　1.1.1 NGOs and Civil Society

　　

　　Civil society involvement has grown to the extent to influence the UN negotiating processes, and the emerging world-wide Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are becoming more and more active, which can be seen from the increasing number of NGOs participants and many more side events organized by whom in climate change summit conferences, such as at COP (Conference of Parties) (Mattias, 2007). Go back till 1992, Rio Conference, the NGO factor was strongly enhanced through two influential publications, ''Earth Summit Times'' and ''Earth Summit Bulletin'' (Engfeldt, 2009, p188), where NGOs were also the first time directly involved in governmental policy making processes (Engfeldt, 2009, p284). NGOs were also evidenced as playing an important role by catalyzing popular pressure over the Stockholm-Rio-Johannesburg processes (Engfeldt, 2009, p341). Further more, according to Young (1997, p296) that the emergence of global civil society has significant implications for the dynamics of international society since it provides a platform for nonstate actors such as NGOs to play their roles in the process of creating and operating the international regimes.

　　

　　Most often, when people talk about civil society, NGOs will come into their mind and which are very active in playing roles that the governments are not willing or not suitable to play. Not only because of the number of them, the funds they handle and the diversity of tasks they pursue has exploded since 1980s, but also their roles to safeguard the environment, to contribute for poverty reduction, human rights, gender equality and democratization of less developed countries and their willingness to let the voice of the marginalized people be heard (Hans et al., 2009). When we talk about financial resources of NGOs, according to Natsios (1995) NGOs derive their budget both from the public and the private sources that include general individuals and enterprises or corporations, thus NGOs maintain their autonomy; While grants from governments also contribute a big proportion for many NGOs, moreover, UN and other IOs (World Bank, IMF) are also financial sources for NGOs, but these grants do not yet approach the level of funding from governments. In the aspect of NGOs internal governance, according to Natsios (1995) NGOs are governed by the board of directors that tend to reflect the particular culture, history and mandates of the relevant concerns. Moreover, NGOs had been given high credits of reputation due to their contribution, which can be indicated by the declaration of the former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan who claimed that NGOs are ‘the conscience of humanity’ (Paul, 2000 in Hans et al., 2009). So with such fame it is understandable that NGOs demand more rights in formal decision making processes, such as playing parts in UN summits. During the Stockholm Conference, there were 134 participating NGOs (mainly from industrialized world), 1,400 NGOs participating in Rio summit, (Conca et al., 2004, p5) afterwards the number of them has increased dramatically, the trend is obvious.

　　

　　There are also a certain number of NGOs whose ideas and world perspectives are different from the mainstream world perspectives (e.g. market economy), such as some NGOs tend to avoid market solutions since profit-purposeful actions tend to degrade the environment (Yuko et al., 2006), therefore the NGOs also have revolutionary potentials (Hans et al., 2009, p5), just as it was claimed by Bebbington et al., (2008, 7) that the globalization has made NGO and civil society the potent force in late modernity who are as an alternative to the state and market, e.g. there is also a particular issue in WTO, where NGOs are not very welcome (Johanson, Eklöf, 2009, p342). In the aspect of NGOs' implications on the business sector, initially, the higher level of business's involving in favor of environment was pressured by NGOs (Dahlin 2009, p342).

　　

　　In general, NGOs are known to concentrate on specific issues which is a part of the landscape, however, there are also some pessimistic point of views that NGOs’ relatively low influence on change since the possible lacking support from or collaboration with multilateral institutions and government (Global Trends 2025, 2008), which can illustrate that the NGOs still have large capacity for networking with multilateral institutions, organizations, governments. In fact, global civil society has allowed NGOs to forge effective global alliances beyond the sovereignty of states where NGOs can jump out of the containment of states nationalism. (Oran Young 1997, p296-297) and according to Bebbington (2008, p9) that northern NGOs have the capacity in seeking to realize a progressive mission in addressing the growing geopolitical inequalities, while southern NGOs appear both within and alongside political and social movements who also collaborate with other supportive NGOs within the struggle against hegemonic and repressive structures provided by the state in conjunction of seeking state-market-civil society structure (Bebbington et al., 2008, p12). However, in the area of defining what is a true NGO, is still grey, since states politicians could possibly misuse these instruments, such as, co-opting or coercing these NGOs, even though many NGOs are also members of national UN delegates and were seen as allies by UN whose practices have constructive implications on government policies. (Johanson, Eklöf, 2009, p342) The notion of the essence of NGO activities can be used by Wapner's phrase ''world civic politics'' and the prime function of which is that their role of transforming attitudes and behaviors within and beyond civil society (Berlin, 2007), in this aspect, NGOs were even considered as vehicles of neo-liberal governmentality by Manji and O’Coill (2002).

　　

　　1.1.2 UNFCCC: a step in Governing of Earth Climate

　　

　　''Following the recommendations of UNEP GC (Governing Council) in 1989 and the Second World Climate Conference in the fall of 1990, the UNGA (United Nations General Assembly) decided in December 1990 to establish an INC (Intergovernmental Negotiation Committee) with the task of negotiating a convention on climate change to be opened for signature at the Rio Conference'', ''a very important decision in the entire Stockholm-Rio-Johannesburg process'', ''UNFCCC marked the first time international law recognized that change in the earth's climate and its adverse effects are a common concern of humankind'' (Engfeldt, 2009, p184-186), if looking back from now, the decision of establishing UNFCCC also has significant historical meanings, since the negotiating processes decide the future of the planet. And also according to Friman (2007) UNFCCC was initially founded in 1992 based on the circumstances that most nations agreed to a Framework Convention on Climate Change, which states that, the parties of the convention “should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, with the principle of equity”. UNFCCC, whose objective is to stabilize of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system (Leggett et al., 2009). UNFCCC was signed at Rio Conference by 153 countries and the EC (European Countries), the conference was attended by 176 countries and the EC, almost all organizations in the UN family and 35 other intergovernmental organizations, namely, around 8000 delegates from their respective countries, 9000 journalists, around 1600 NGOs, the total number of persons involved was around 40,000 to 45,000 (Engfeldt, 2009, p186-188).

　　

　　The UNFCCC became forcefully effective in 1994, and the first meeting of the COP was convened in Berlin in 1995, where an agreement for a mandate to guide negotiations on a protocol to strengthen the commitments under the convention and also to cut GHGs emissions beyond 2000, and later on in 1997 UNFCCC adopted Kyoto Protocol (Engfeldt, 2009, p215). The following years, many formal, informal meetings and climate change summits have been convened in places such as, Genva (COP2, 1996), Kyoto (COP3, 1997), Buenos Aires (COP4, 1998), Bonn (COP5, 1999), The Hague (COP6, 2000), Marrakech (COP7, 2001), New Delhi (COP 8, 2002), Milan (COP9, 2003), Buenos (COP10, 2004), Montreal (COP11), Bonn (COP 12), Bali (COP 13), Poznań (COP 14), Copenhagen (COP 15), Cachoeira, Paulista , Bracknell, Berlin, Cologne, Rio de Janeiro, Reading, Louvain-la-Neuve, Cologne, Nairobi, Montreal, Kyoto, Copenhagen, however, when it comes to the historical responsibility in climate change negotiations the 1997 Brazilian proposal to the Kyoto negotiations was the first time an operational version of the concept received substantial attention by the UNFCCC (Harris 2007; Friman, 2007). And the fact that US did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol made the negotiating processes even more complicated (Engfeldt, 2009, p215). During all the past years, north-south divide/conflicts has always been standing in the way and slowing down the negotiating processes since the south obviously didn't want the north to exert their will on, in another word, historical responsibility (cumulative/historical emissions) and north-south divide/conflicts have been the main debate during the negotiating processes (Whalley, Walsh, 2009), even though there are commentators who are trying to blur the north-south divide in the climate change negotiating processes by highlighting the other coalitions such as EU, Japan, USA, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Norway and New Zeeland (JUSCANNZ) and the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) (Daniel, 2001, p8). UNFCCC is making progress slowly and hard, if the goal to get a full treaty that can replace the Kyoto Protocol by the end of 2012 is still largely unknown after the so many years’ setbacks, however, China’s commitment to reduce emissions by 40-45 percent per unit of GDP from a 2005 base year by 2020 is a positive first step towards the negotiation processes in the coming years (Whalley, Walsh, 2009, p1). More over, in a larger context, with the organizational capacity evolves over time, the climate related international and transnational regimes will play significant roles in the future’s governance on world affairs, e.g. climate governance, and effective climate governance can only be achieved by UNFCCC exerting its effective efforts in transforming the behaviors deep within the economic and social systems of its member states (Drawn the insights from Oran Young’ Global governance, 1997) which may turn their influence on that ''The UNFCCC contained many commitments of all parties, though few were quantified and there were no sanctions for failing to meet commitments (Leggett et al., 2009)''. In a word, the future for UNFCCC’s goal for a legally implemented climate change treaty is bright even though the road to get there is torturous, but the historical responsibility and achievement of UNFCCC should be accredited, UNFCCC is an important step in the Earth’s further governing and combating the climate!

　　

　　1.2 Hypothesis

　　

　　The hypothesis of the result of the study is that NGOs’ striving for autonomy and capacity building by joining the UN family and networking with multilateral institutions, intergovernmental organizations, international organizations, and political powers will make them more influential in international negotiation processes, and the forces of NGOs, international and transnational civil society in conjunction with the alliance of international organizations will provide the possibilities for the planet achieving more efficient earth system governance, and possibly lead a wave of earth system governance revolution.

　　

　　1.3 Aim and Research Questions

　　

　　1.3.1 Aim

　　

　　Primary Aim

　　

　　The aim of this study is attempting to interpret that how the forces of NGOs, civil society, IOs (International Organizations) contribute the governing of earth systems, based on the application of the law of contradictions and unification.

　　

　　Secondary Aim

　　

　　To understand the interrelations between these forces!

　　

　　1.3.2 Research Questions

　　

　　In order to fulfill the aim of this study, the following questions need to be addressed:

　　

　　What is the fundamental driving force for NGOs, civil society phenomena?

　　

　　What are the interrelationships between NGOs, UN centered IOs, International Civil Society and the governing of earth systems?

　　

　　What are the consequences when a stronger global NGO network system (e.g. NGOs ally with UN, IOs, International civil society, IGOs) has been established?

　　

　　1.3.3 Methodology

　　

　　As Mao (1937) stressed that we need to shun away from subjectivity, one-sidedness and superficiality in doing research. Therefore we need to see the phenomenon of NGOs and earth system governance from a broader context thus we can avoid one-sidedness and prejudice, or only seeing partial but not the whole (metaphor, only the tree, but not the forest), therefore the writer hereby uses the systematic or holistic approach to account for NGO phenomenon in conjunction with keeping the attitude of “imaginative yet focused, intuitive yet logical, flexible yet methodical, ingenious yet practical” (O'Leary, 2004, p.101) in mind. According to Funtowicz (1994) a perspective that environmental issues that exist in an interconnected social and natural context in conjunction with these issues being complex, uncertain and lacking clearly defined boundaries, thus finding solutions to address these issues require not only an understanding of the environment, the threats but also involving influences by the actions and behaviors of multiple societal actors such as NGOs, this paper is one of those papers done by researchers that to attempt to find solutions to address environmental issues and to help the multiple societal actors such as NGOs, UN, international organizations, governments, understanding the NGOs and earth system governance phenomenon and hopefully according to which the multiple actors could adjust to their actions and behaviors to provide more efficient global governance. Therefore, the top priority of this paper is to avoid seeing things on surface or being superficial, since according to Mao (1937) that being superficial means that we don't consider the issues from a multifaceted point of view and also that we reject to probe deeper into the study (after glimpsing the rough surface we immediately try to come out an conclusion) with this kind of subjective thinking and doing things is bound to lead to trouble. In literature of western world Mao was generally considered as a controversial person, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use his knowledge at all, and as scholars we need to critically analyze and use his certain knowledge to approach certain things, so following the teaching of Mao in the aspect of studying things both in theory and practice, thus the method, objectivist was applied to continue this exploration. Hopefully ‘subjectivity and being arbitrary could be avoided, and the further analysis could be based on the specific conditions in the actual objective movement of these NGO phenomena, the contradictions between these phenomena could be discovered, the specific positions of each aspect of every contradiction and the specific interrelations of the contradictions could be  understood.

　　

　　The research design of a study is usually made up of two elements: research strategy and research materials. The research strategy covers survey, literature review analysis, case study, organization study and historical or archival analysis if necessary. Research material includes relevant people and relevant literature and documents (scientific papers, UN or other institution reports). (Arts, 1998, p37-41) In order to fulfill the aim of the study, to study the roles of NGOs, IOs, Civil Society and their interactions in global governance, the approach based from multifaceted point of views is needed. And to understand the interrelationships between these forces, namely, NGOs, civil society, IOs, World Governments, studies must be based on a historical, conceptual and holistic approach.

　　

　　As stated above, the research questions will need to be answered by analysis of previous and present new literatures. Further more, the dialectics are the main fundamental approach in observing and studying the ‘‘NGOs, Civil Society, governmental forces, IOs and their interactions in the Governing of Earth Systems’’, which will penetrate the whole study. Moreover, for the sake of the inflow of logic, chapter 3 was designed to integrate both the theoretical and empirical data and analysis. So what are the contradictions, unification and metabolism?

　　

　　According to Lenin All phenomena and processes in nature contain contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies, which was later on be criticized, developed and expanded by Mao that the interdependence of the contradictory aspects present in all things and the struggle between these aspects are the driving forces for the life motion and growth of all things, there is nothing that does not contain contradiction, without contradiction nothing would exist (Mao, 1937). And according to Mao (1937) that the universality of contradiction has a twofold meaning; One is that contradiction exists in the process of development of all things, and the other is that in the process of development of each thing a movement of opposites exists from the beginning to the end. However, the different aspects of contradictions are also co-dependent on each other, without one aspect of the contradictions the other aspect cannot exist either, e.g. if there is sorrow, how the happiness be felt; without negative, how the positive can exist; without death, what is being alive; without climate change, how could the climate governance be needed; without bad people, how the good people can be defined…., thus there are also unification between all different aspect of contradictions, in stead of contradictions the aspect of unification will be a key focus that penetrate this paper.

　　

　　Metabolism is known as natural phenomenon in our nature, indeed, such as life carriers need to intake and uptake food and then return them as fecal material to natural system. As it was addressed in Contradictions (Mao 1937, section 4) metabolism is an irresistible law widespread in the universe. Inside any things in the universe there are two aspects of contradictions, the old and the new, thus form a series of winding struggle, the consequences of the struggle is that the new things or phenomena grow and rise to the degree of being dominant while the old aspect transforms from being large into small and gradually dying out, once the new things or phenomena could dominate the old things, the nature of the old things or phenomena again evolve into the nature of new things and phenomena. Based on the internal nature of the things and external factors or conditions, after different forms of change, one thing will transform into another thing. Thus Mao concluded that the nature of things was regulated by the main aspect of the dominating aspect of contradictions. The nature of the things will subject to the change in the main aspect of the dominating aspect of contradictions.

　　

　　However, based on the analysis of Mao’s paper, Mao didn’t believe metaphysics, but Mao believed in dialectical materialism which actually against Mao’s own theory of the understanding of dialectics. Since Mao states that there are contradictions inherent in everything, therefore there should also contradictions and unification between dialectical materialism and metaphysic, because without metaphysics, how could dialectical materialism could be evolved out, and how could the dialectical materialism could even exist, such as without ‘up’ how to define ‘down’, without ‘bad’ how to define ‘good’, without ‘death’, how to define ‘being alive’, Mao believe in dialectics, but Mao also mentioned that there are contradictions and unification between dialectical materialism and metaphysics, since unification could be found between dialectical materialism and metaphysics, so Mao can not only believe in ‘dialectical materialism’, because dialectical materialism and metaphysics co-exist, co-evolve and co-develop, which can be used to interpret the reason why that there are always people who believe in metaphysics (religious people) and dialectical materialism (Scientists). Arguments can be found and supported by Yang (2002) that A. Comte and E. Durkheim established empirical sociology whose philosophical thoughts are originally from deism of Condorcet, Montesquieu and Rousseau, the philosophical thoughts of M. Weber’s sociology theory is originally from the rationalism and metaphysics philosophy in Germany, T. Parsons’ function theory is the combination of the theory of Durkheim and Weber, whose philosophical thoughts both contain materialism and metaphysics, collectivism and individualism, G. Homans’ and Peter Blau’s exchange theory are established based on the British economists’ economic point of views and Bentham’s utilitarianism, and H. Garfinkel’s specification rebel experiments are to prove the ‘possibility of the common perception of the world’ but whose folklore is inherited from Husserl’s phenomenology. Above just mentioned can explain the reason why I want to use philosophical approach to write this paper is also because of that philosophical thinking is a prerequisite to interpret the world’s phenomenon.

　　

　　When we study environmental concerns we need to think more systematically on institutional connections and think about the ways how individual regimes are embedded in larger institutional structures and how they impinge one another in international society. (Drawn the insights from Charnovitz 1995) Thus for the sake of holistically studying NGOs, Civil Society and Earth System Governance phenomena from a multifaceted point of views, and for a clear research framework to fulfill the aim of this study, the following figure 1 was designed. To make it easier understandable, the arrows in the structure will be elaborated as follows:

　　

　　Arrow a represents the feedbacks from the international system that are targeted to the states level such as enabling or constraining; Arrow b represents the interactions between states and industry, business and other actors; Arrow c represents interrelationships between states and NGOs; Arrow d represents the feedbacks or impact of NGOs and civil society; Arrow e represents that the states are still the mainstream actors in the international political arena; Arrow f illustrates there are certain products that are produced in the political arena, therefore f hereby be read as ‘leads to’ or ‘produces’; Arrow g represents the feedbacks from the ‘products’ to the NGOs and civil society; Arrow h represents the impact of the ‘products’ to the industry and business; Arrow j and I represent feedbacks; Arrow k represents ‘provide’ and ‘macro-govern’.

　　

　　International System

　　IOs, Global civil society

　　NGOs and Civil Society

　　States and Governments

　　Industry, Business and others

　　d

　　a

　　c

　　b

　　e

　　Political Arena

　　↓

　　NGO → States → Others

　　↓

　　Negotiations and Decision-making

　　f

　　UNFCCC

　　h

　　g

　　Earth System Governance

　　k

　　j

　　i

　　

　　Figure 1, Holistic point of view on NGOs and their relations with others

　　

　　

　　

　　

　　To let the readers further understand the NGO phenomena and to probe deeper in the empirical and analysis chapters, terms like concept of NGOs, political arena, NGO diplomacy, the law of contradictions and unification, and global environmental governance need to be familiar with in the following sections thus we may attempt to avoid the one-sidedness by looking at issues all-sidedly, and with keeping this model in mind during the study we can observe and explain both ‘inside the mountain’ and ‘outside the mountain’.

　　

　　

　　

　　Chapter 2-Theory

　　

　　2.1 Diversity and Concept of NGOs

　　

　　As Gerard Clark (1998, p2) points out that there are a variety of NGOs world wide, they can also belong to other terms because the term NGO is very broad, such as voluntary associations, non-profit associations, private voluntary associations, nongovernmental development organizations, international nongovernmental organizations, new social movement organizations, people’s organizations, membership organizations, grassroots support organizations, self-governing organizations…, and as the case representative China, according to SHUI-YAN (2008) that there are mainly three types of NGOs such as, student environmental groups, government-organized NGOs and civic environmental NGOs.

　　

　　According to what has been mentioned above in chapter 1, in the area of defining what a genuine NGO is, is still grey. Non-governmental organization literally means the kind of organization that is not established by governments. But this concept can be too broad, since there are so many organizations, institutions, groups not established by governments such as churches, scientific unions, corporations, students societies, chess or sport clubs, terrorist groups…., the broad concept leads to confusion and disagreements (Bas Art, 1998, p49) According Tord Björk (p7) that NGOs are national, transnational and multinational actors formed by individuals, expertise group, whose playing ground is both regionally and internationally but without the direct intervenes from the governments, though this can not be applied in all the NGOs since there are NGOs set up by the states, such as the ones that in China.

　　

　　As M. Betsill et al., (1998, p4) points out that studies of international environmental negotiations routinely highlight three types of NGOs, environmental NGOs, scientific organizations and those NGOs that represent the interests of business and industry.  To narrow down the concept and make the definition more in line with the type of organizations studied in this research, we define the concept hereby as those NGOs who have their missions in the aspect of protecting the nature, safeguarding the humanity, preventing the negative climate change consequences, promoting sustainable development in this case, those organizations that seek to influence political decision-making by participating UN summits, such as Green Peace, WWF….

　　

　　2.2 Political arena and power striving

　　

　　Political arena are defined as formal meeting places of political players who struggle, debate, negotiate on world affairs, of course, like any other arena, there are certain rules, though the rules can be changed by the players (Arts 1998, p55) In the arena, as long the players keep on playing there will be losers and winners, though the temporary losers can also be winners in the end if they are strong enough to ‘stand up’ again. It is understandable that the players who have more power and influence tend to win. Power and influence can work as advantages or means for the players to win. In this study, we are not comparing the power or influence of individuals but the power or influence of NGOs as a collective whole in UN family with other players such as states delegates. And according to Arts (1998, p57) that power can be transformed into influence and influence can also be transformed into power or in another word, ‘‘power is based on practices of influence whereas these practices sustain power (Huberts, 1994, p39)’’. Power and influence also have correlations with resources; Resources can somehow indicate someone’s power and influence level, in another word, power and influence helps with expanding resources and vice versa, resources helps enhancing the power and influence (Huberts and Kleinnijenhuis, 1994). Resources include financial strengths and networks, therefore money matters, networks matters. Of course, there are many factors determine the final success of an organization or an individual, indeed, such as, moral level of the individual or organization, leadership charisma and ability, the number of supporters, attractive visualization of the future scenarios, strategic planning all matters to the success. Powers from the states are the advantages over the NGO collective, since the states have the GDP, populations, military capacity, (Betsill et al., 1998, p21) and other soft power generators backing up, while the only advantage for NGOs is that the voice of safeguarding humanity. And according to M. Betsill et al., (1998, p, ix) NGOs can carry considerable political weight and there are cases that NGO have successfully persuaded governments to change certain policies, the growing number of NGO diplomats now play a significant role in intergovernmental negotiations. Therefore, the increased participation of NGOs in political processes can reflect that there have been broader changes in the nature of diplomacy in world politics (Betsill et al., 1998, p2), e.g. in multilateral negotiations in UN summit conferences, NGO representatives worked as diplomats who represent constituencies that are not bound by territorial boundaries but by common values, knowledge and interests within the whole humanity while the state diplomats become narrow-minded and national benefits-oriented (e.g. north south divide and conflicts) and whose missions are to maximize their economic or other forms of benefits (Starkey, Boyer and Wilkenfeld, 2005). Moreover, according to Betsill (2006) that the international negotiations are one political arena in which NGOs attempt to shape those policy-makings related to climate change, environment and sustainability. NGOs are very active actors, their images are everywhere. Their images also appear in other arenas such as domestic policy making, the formation of global civil society and the decision making of private corporations. However, according to the current UN rules only the states have the formal decision-making power (the states decide who participate and the nature of the participation, finally also they decide whether to vote on a particular decision) during international negotiations, NGOs can only work as observers who do not have formal voting authority (Betsill et al., 1998, p6).

　　

　　2.3 Evolution of Green Movement

　　

　　The industrial revolution marked by the invention of steam engine started in 18 century,  the second industrial revolution marked by the invention of electric light, the third technological revolution marked by the invention of computer and the fourth technological revolution marked by the rapid developing internet network which created the era of information. The above four revolution made the mankind’s production power over the natural system changed dramatically which caused numerous pollution, ecosystem destruction, natural resource depletion, desertification, water crisis……

　　

　　The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 was often regarded as the catalyst for the first wave of environmental movement, well, it was just a beginning, afterwards, a large number of publications emerged that set out in start terms the terrible environmental crisis facing humankind, with the awareness spreading and supporters were springing up around the world and with the establishment of Earth Day in 1970 made the environment issue a topic on political agenda and later on the Stockholm Conference was held in 1972 marked as a milestone in addressing the environmental issues internationally and was also remembered as well for the establishment of the UN Environment Programme (Broadhead, 2002, p, 31 - 34). With the evolution process going on, an influential commission was established in 1983 which was commonly known as the Brundtland Commission for honor of former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland’s chairing WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development), the published report in 1987 by the commission was called ‘‘Our Common Future’’ (Lee-Anne, p, 48), which gradually made the concept of Sustainable Development world-widely accepted and had led many regional and local environmental movement. The ideological roots of the European Green Parties were originally evolved and developed from the actions, demonstrations, publications, since the 1960s, and it was claimed that Green Parties mark the rise of a ‘new’ political era (Burchell, 2002), and many of them, such as, Green party in Sweden, Austria, Germany, has significantly increased their influence and political competition advantages. The green parties will also possibly find their development space in the democratic developing countries such as India, the emerging environmental issues and crises will also make green politics play an important role there. The world is in a process of constantly changing, a few years ago, climate issues were still not the top priority in the agenda of IOs, governmental institutions, agencies, NGOs, but due to the UN’s advocacy, efforts of working groups of IPCC, world researchers, EU’s promoting, efforts of green parties, environmental activists, climate issues has attracted a lot attention world-widely.

　　

　　2.4 Governing Earth Systems

　　

　　The Brundtland Commission defined sustainable development as the kind of development that ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED, 1987). “The international risks inherent in the present situation can be sensed if we imagine that the disastrous consequences for a spaceship if it were manned by a crew comprised of a dozen astronauts, each with a different idea about where he wants to go and about the goal of the mission. Yet the imaginary picture is the real picture of how things are with Spaceship Earth. It is manned by more than a hundred governments with different and often conflicting missions and with nobody in charge of the crew.’’(Hyman 1975:275) In the same time, according to Rockström (2008) “We are experiencing a very chaotic time, where humanity determines the outcomes for the Planet (Note: Earth is the only one planet found that suit humans to live) – Sustainability or collapse?’’. On the other hand, there were 132 state governments in 1972 while the number becomes 191 in 2002, there were only 39 democratic countries in the world but the number had become 139 after 30 years (M. Betsill et al., 2008, p, viii), in conjunction with the rising influence of NGOs and civil society, which made the international governance even more complex. Go back till 1990s there were some far-reaching proposals that proposed for establishing a global parliamentarian assembly, which would bring together ‘parliamentarians’ from across the continents and oceans, actually, this idea has initiated the Commission on Global Governance in 1995, as an ‘assembly of the people’ (Commission on Global Governance 1995, p257 in Biermann 2006, p24). It is also hard for me to denial the arguments drawn from peace, global justice, the environment, the democracy by Torbjörn Tännsjö (2008) that establishing a world government helps the world addressing challenging issues in 21 century.

　　

　　According to Biermann (2006) the global governance was defined by three criteria, firstly, and by whom that the global governance as characterized by the rising number of participants ranging from multinational corporations, networks of scientists and environmentalists to non-governmental actors such as intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations. Secondly, the global governance was marked by new mechanisms of organizations such as public-private and private-private partnerships, in conjunction with the conventional system of legal treaties negotiated by governments. Thirdly, the global governance as has been characterized by different layers and clusters of rule-making and rule-implementation, horizontally between different parallel rule-making systems and vertically between supranational, international, national and subnational layers of authority. Or in another word, ‘‘earth system governance can be defined as the sum of the formal and informal rule systems and actor-networks at all levels of human society (from local to global) that are set up to influence the co-evolution of human and natural systems in a way that secures the sustainable development of human society’’ (Biermann 2006, p7). Earth system governance includes both the societal world and natural system, thus is broader than the ‘global governance’, for the sake of further analyzing and understanding the interrelations between NGOs phenomena and earth system governance, thus this term should hereby be familiar with and the reason that the term sustainable development is mentioned here is that to facilitate the analysis of earth system governance to science of sustainable development. Further more, earth system governance can also be understood as that more and more actors involved in the global political arena will contribute to the strengthening of the present architecture of institutions, organizations and networks at local and global levels (Biermann 2006, p7). Since the earth system governance is still a relatively new concept that is not widely accepted, therefore the development of new norms and conceptual frameworks for global collective actions in this new territory is necessary (Biermann 2006, p8).

　　

　　2.5 Socialism, Capitalism, State Capitalism

　　…

　　

　　

　　2.6 Reformism and Radicalism

　　

　　NGOs have positive contributions to development of alternatives, but compared to traditional political systems, NGOs always in the position with many disadvantages, (Bebbington 2008, p14-18) they will demand for change, most often it started with the approach of reformism, however, this approach may not work when the dominating regime is two powerful, inn order to get more attention and conscience support from the public thus the approach of radical revolutionism will be applied by some though it can have great risk.

　　

　　In the larger context that the world is experiencing a tough time, though wars between big powers seem self-destroying, but radical actions such as terrorism still exists. Hence radicalism can be defined as the ideology of a certain minority pursues their beliefs with radical actions. Mainstream and moderate NGOs will tend to develop more long-term and reliable relationship with the dominant institutions and try to avoid legitimacy-threatening tactics while the radical organizations being less reliant on those dominant resources and thus have the attitude of ‘nothing to lose’ and feel free to carry radical tactics (Michael et al., 2009, p87). On the other aspect, due to the advantages of state, a certain number of NGOs became working as subcontracted service providers or even marginalized (Many NGOs were set up or funded by the government, can only choose to do the bottom work that the state is not suitable to do, thus their innovativeness, autonomy, legitimacy , accountability and the ability that to provide alternatives have to be compromised; Edwards and Hulme 1996 in Bebbington 2008, p14), and also reinforced by their donors’ demands, which potentially put NGOs’ more radical role at risk.

　　

　　Figure 2.1 is a sound illustration of the interconnections between actions and the level of institutionalization.

　　Highly institutionalized                                                                                               Barely institutionalized

　　

　　

　　

　　Political and   Leafleting    Protests          Civil               Direct action           Destruction of            Violence

　　regulatory                       and marches   disobedience      inhibiting                 property

　　lobbying                                                                           business                     

　　                                                                                         practices

　　Figure 2.1 Radicalism and degree of institutionalization

　　

　　

　　Obviously, it can be illustrated that the more mature of the organization, the less radical approaches be used; these highly institutionalized organizations have more sense of rationality. These two terms mentioned here for the sake of further analyzing the evolution processes of the present rising forces, e.g. NGOs, Civil Society, and IOs.

　　

　　

　　Chapter 3 – Argument, Analysis and Discussion

　　

　　

　　3.0 Argument drawn from philosophers

　　

　　Torbjörn Tännsjö (2008, p11) states that a world government has high possibility to be established without resorting to force. Case can be found, e.g. Mahatma Gandhi applied non-violence, non-cooperative approach to fight for independence, but still violence had emerged, lots of people been persecuted, died, Gandhi himself was assassinated in 1948. However, the primary approach used by Gandhi is peace and non-violence. 

　　

　　If we look back to the history that every time when there is a big social transformation, lots of tumult and disorder had been created and emerged.  After Qin Shi Huang Ying Zheng swepted over the other six countries and united the whole China and established the first centralized empire, but because of the accumulated hate and conflicts, the empire collapsed in a few decades. I fully understand that now the historical context has been changed, but essence of politics has never been changed, that is to manage people and to get the public in control, the society in order. However, reforming the international system to establish a cosmopolitan democratic world government is to deal with even more diversified people across continents, and it is known that people’s ideology and mind are very hard to be changed and transformed unless they realize these thoughts themselves or the rising forces force them to compromise. There are three stages that for new ideas and findings to be accepted, firstly, the idea was considered naive and people rarely believe it, secondly with advocacy and the growth of people, some people start to rethink about it and some people already support it, thirdly, when the conditions are finally ripe, most the people finally accept the idea. (Darwin’s Evolution, Marks’ Socialism, etc.), so when the conditions are not ripe, campaign and mobilization both in the political system and civil society will have to promote this process, but during this process, a certain people’s benefits will be challenged, thus certain anti-actions or defense will be launched by these conservative people who stand on the side of ‘remain the present status quo’ (we have witnessed how hard that Barack Obama’s medical care reform has been), and imagine that there are still many very religious governments, dictatorships, locked-up countries, the difficulty for reaching universal agreement will just be far beyond imagination. In many developing countries, the people who are fighting for democracy, freedom, human rights have been put into prison.   

　　

　　To be continued………………….

　　

　　3.1 NGOs’ exerting influence on society

　　

　　As it was partially written in the text in 1.1.3 Evolution of Green social movement, the following figure 1.1 can give a more visualized picture of NGOs and their functions and influences during their evolving processes in a larger context. From figure 1.1, the following text is illustrated. This section is to fulfill the aim of understanding the interrelationships between NGOs and other relevant objects.

　　

　　NGOs are the active actors both within and beyond the world of civil society, the forces of civil society influences social movement, the social movements stimulate the new founding NGOs which vise versa influences back the social movement and the social movement thus enhances the forces of civil society. The NGOs was initially founded as advocacy groups, but with the development and growth of them, operation NGOs were formed to carry out specific and practical actions which also enhance their competition and survival capacity in the NGOs world. NGOs, civil society and social movements thus grow, develop and evolve together. And as it was concluded by Michael et al., (2009, p13) that NGOs’ networks and coalitions play important roles in achieving their missions.

　　           Civil society

　　Social movement (1960s civil rights/advocacy)

　　Social movement (environmental movement)

　　Social movement (conservation movement)

　　Advocacy NGOs (Environmental Defense Fund, National Resources Defense Council)

　　Operation NGOs (WWF, The Nature Conservancy)

　　Figure 3.1 Relationship among civil society, social movements and NGOs: the example of the environmental movement (Resource: Michael et al., 2009, p11)

　　

　　As it was mentioned in the first section of the paper, there are NGOs whose perspectives are different from the mainstream world perspective, such as, market economy. Due to the shortcomings and failures of market solutions, the emerging NGOs thus have the context to address the emerging issues derived from the failures of market solutions, regulators and legislators, such as, when the market can not adequately provide all goods and services that are socially desirable, the indirect cost of the actions (e.g. war, logging forest), the imperfect market competition system (NGOs emerged to support defensive actions against the expansion of market-led development, Bebbington et al., 2008, p14), dissatisfaction with regulatory and legislators responses to market failures, a power imbalance in the political system. (Michael et al., 2009, p17-30) Just as it was concluded by Bebbington et al., (2008, p25) that NGOs can exert their roles either into hegemonic discourses that serve to empower capitalist knowledge and other forms of productive ability or into counter-hegemonic directions that to address the failures produced by the capitalist systems. The NGOs’ roles can be shown by figure 3.1.

　　

　　Further more, as it was mentioned above in the first introduction section, the technology improvement such as internet will enhance the forces of civil society and thus create the technological context for the growing number of NGOs. The increase of the proportion of the middle classes in many developing countries will also enhance the power of civil society by demanding more freedom (more freedom vise versa stimulates the processes of democratization) and thus influence the civil society world, which promote the founding and creation of more NGOs. 

　　

　　NGOs have also been attempting to influence the UNFCCC, thus directly impact the global climate governance and indirectly exert their influences to the society, e.g. according to Betsill et al., (2008, p ix) that there are three stages in the negotiating processes that NGOs attempt to influence, namely, issues framing, agenda setting and understanding the position of key actors (e.g. influential politician). The goal of Watchdog campaign is to pressure the targeted objects to comply with dominant institution standards (Michael et al., 2009, p94). The objects include firms, multinational corporations, and local authorities, such as a local firm’s business may have negative impacts to the local environmental security. The actions will impact the propaganda and behaviors of these firms, multinational corporations, local authorities, and these business sectors thus feedback to the international negotiations since they also attend world environment conferences. Demonstrations, mass meetings, protest marches, sit-downs, wildcats, and even riots (Björk, p14) have been used by NGOs in exerting influences before, during and beyond those earth summits. Other strategies can be derived both from literature review, website review (Nicholson, 2010) and email responses from some NGO representatives (Mattos-Fonseca 2010) as follows: Go to the field to do the concrete work; Advocacy; Organize a protest march outside of the conference hall; Organize side events during the conferences; Send emails, letters, and petitions to party delegates; Lobby the delegates of the parties and other organizations; Violent and peace demonstrations; Networking with other influential NGOs; Signature advocacy by international citizens; Public Address; Write proposals and drafting text for the negotiation; circulating information and position papers; working with the media; hosting side events; making interventions during debates; and monitoring developments in the negotiations; Make propaganda (Note: To attract public and private contributions to run their programmes), website, media, flysheets, movie or cartoon animation flash (e.g. on Youtube, or on their respective website homepage ); Survey, questionnaires; As it was concluded by Arts (1998, p155) in the chapter NGOs and UNFCCC that NGOs had no direct impact on the UNFCCC text and also none of their text proposals had been adopted by governments or be included in the treaty, though this may not represent their roles and influence after 1998. Moreover, even NGOs claim that they co-determined the outcome of Berlin summit by pressuring both the north and the south to compromise, and by delivering text elements for the Green Paper as well as the Berlin Mandate, however, the exact extent of influence of NGOs was suspected by the general due to the possible reason that NGOs exaggerated their real influence. In fact, the role of NGOs in Berlin was quite similar to the one played at INC5 just before Rio, however, due to the media exposure and demonstration activities, NGOs in conjunction with the fact that the host country didn't want the conference to be a total failure, NGOs succeeded in mobilizing additional pressure on the delegates to come up with a more satisfactory result, and who also worked as intermediary to solve conflicts between the rich and the poor countries and the efforts done by these NGOs on getting the more countries in the south on board should also not be forgotten though they were not alone in the process. (Arts, 1998, p151-156) Another worth mentioning minor success of NGOs can be regarded to the AOSIS Protocol, after considering the circumstances NGOs compromised by dropping the demands for more stringent commitments to be adopted in a protocol and accepted the Toronto target as a policy goal to campaign fro the INCs, though the protocol was not adopted by the COP but was formally tabled and had the chance to be considered during the negotiating process. (Arts, 1998, p135-136) 

　　

　　NGOs have thus exerted their influence into the international system, in conjunction with the point of views mentioned above that NGOs also have revolutionary potentials which can be supported by (Oran Young 1997, p295) that the striking growth of the number of NGOs exemplifies the societal reform process.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

　　

　　3.2 The dialectical analysis of the Law of Contradictions and Unification

　　

　　This section continues observing world phenomena based on the law of contradictions and unification mentioned in the second chapter of this paper. To make it easier understandable, here is some examples, e.g. action force and reaction force in Mechanics, molecular combination and decomposition in Chemistry, electropositive and electronegative in Physics, Class Struggle in Social Science, attack and defense, advance and retreat, victory and defeat in warfare, all these mutually contradictory phenomena can illustrate that one side of the contradictions co-exist with the other side, if one side loses, the other side will not exist either, these contradictions exist in the motion and development processes of their respective things and in the process of each thing a movement of opposites exists from the beginning to the end (Mao, 1937). In modern world, contradictions also exist widespread and examples can be easily found as long we carefully observe the world in our daily life such as, in university professors lead the students (knowledge contradictions), but the students also feedback the professors in a certain way too (supervisors supervise students thesis but through which they also improve their supervising capacity or maybe get inspired by the knowledge of students, hereby we call ‘mutual growth in the supervising process’); men chase women, women run (psychological and emotional contradictions) or when the men stop, women chase back to keep the ‘mutual pursue’ going, finally coagulate (unification); water, fire and humans (the natural contradictions made them hard to ‘get along’, flooding and fire can kill people, but people learned to take advantage of this contradiction to benefit themselves, such as they use fire and water to cook food while there is still a danger such as accidentally burned by water and fire, in a word, the contradictions exist in the processes that humans learn to use the water and fire, however, in the process of this continual usage, the contradictions never stop function, in another word, water and fire may kill people but without these natural contradictions humans couldn’t survive)…, thus the law of contradictions function in all things which is the universality of contradiction.

　　

　　

　　With the above criticizing and understanding the law of contradictions and unification, now we can say that the world is functioning under the law of contradictions and unification of things, but can we say that the human society in the world is going to the direction of unification (e.g. the creation of a world government, though it was considered naive by a lot researchers)? To answer this question we need to go back till where the human history starts, millions of years ago, the ‘humans’ were still living in the forest, gradually with the natural departure within the ape community the ancient man-apes started living in a different environment, they gradually adapted the environment there, why they departed? The writer guesses that some natural change maybe was the driving force for the departure or in another word, the contradictions between apes and the environment in the moment forced a certain number of apes to leave for survival reasons. With the number of the man-apes growing, some decide to stay, some decide to leave, the population thus dispersed everywhere, different communities were formed with boundaries, the contradictions between the different tribes cause ‘war’ or ‘intrusion’ between them, thus through the brutal conquering, the mini-tribe coagulate to larger one, with the thousands of years fighting, coagulating, the original country were gradually formed. In the ancient history of China, there were thousands of ‘countries’, even until spring and autumn period, there were still around 150 countries (we call Zhu Hou Guo in Chinese), because of the contradictions the conquering and coagulating lasted for more than 360 years, the number of countries decreased into around 20 in China's beginning of Warring States period between 475 BC ~ 221 BC, in 221 BC, The First Emperor Ying Zheng swept across the six countries  and unified the Central Plains, thus started a new history phase. (Si Maqian, BC 104), but the history doesn't stop heading forward, the territory of China has gone though fluctuations of expansion and contraction, the similar history has been experienced in America, France, Germany, the last 5 hundred years, the contradictions and unification law had never stopped functioning, during these 5 centuries the world had gone through the colonization period, colonized countries fight for independence from colonizers in the past several centuries, the contradictions between colonizers and colonizees moved this process forward, after decades of fighting, many countries won their independence, later on in 20th century world society had gone through many huge events, such as two world wars (According to Mearsheimer 1995 in Diehl 2005, p60: the causes of peace and war are largely due to the power striving and balancing, I hereby interpret it as power contradiction), cold war between capitalist-bloc countries and communist-bloc countries (Note: well, the ideological contradictions between capitalism and communism groups still exist), the collapse of Soviet Union, during all these events the law of contradictions were largely involved. And it is known that now there are still contradictions (Taiwan’s maintaining independence and Mainland’s seeking unification) and unification (beneficial economical trading) between China and Taiwan. With the forming of European Union, the large regionalism is another happening phenomenon, in Jan. 1st China and 10 other South-eastern Asian countries formed a new economical free market is a new indicator that the Asia is stepping in a larger collective union (Note: economic dependence continues to be as great as in the times of direct political control Ward (1972) p175), in the global context, there are also Africa Union (Established in 2002 as a successor to the Organization of African Unity: Michel in Mellbourn 2005, p67), North-American Union and many other forms of alliances that are forming, the law of contradictions and unification never stopped functioning, in the aspect of globalization, there are always contradictions between the states, and it is the contradictions that move the process of the globalization in all aspects, though the contradictions were solved in a relatively more peaceful and moderate manner, since the war is largely out of date in 21st century (because of the nuclear deterrent, no big country can afford the nuclear war, though there are still regional war to terrorism), dialogue and communication have become the mainstream way of approaching issues such as the north and south debate is still fierce especially in the international negotiation arenas, e.g. Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009. The law of contradictions and unification is moving the history forward, after the large regionalism coagulation the world will possibly be made up by several large unions, such as EU, Africa Union, American Union (Note: America is afraid of the Union of Europe and Asia since they regionally connected and closer and if they joined the alliance, America will be marginalized, which is also the reason why America put so much weight on middle east issues since middle east specially can function as the special blockage between Europe and Asia), Asian Union, South-American Union, Arabic Union, and other forms of Inter-Continental Union (BRIC), the law of contradictions and unification will continue its functioning, which means there will still be contradictions between these large unions, thus the unification of countries is the big historic trend, and according to Mao (1937) that contradictions of different nature can only be addressed by approaches of different nature. In social context, e.g. the contradictions between the public and feudal system will be addressed by democratic revolution which has already been proved by the history, the contradictions between human society and nature can be addressed by green revolution which has happened and is happening and possibly will continue to happen in the future. The contradictions between governments can only be addressed by intergovernmental and non-governmental approaches (Note: There are contradictions between the north and the south, the rich countries and the poor countries; The contradictions between world terrorism and world peace can be addressed by approaches concern collective security which actually already advanced the idea of a universal obligation to oppose it, even though the contradiction at the heart of collective security is forever present, and in the process of addressing world peace and security affairs, a more cohesive worldwide new form of polity will possibly be evolved out; Resource: Miller 1999 in Diehl 2005, p218-222), however, these non-governmental approaches must be neutral and moderate, e.g. the International Red Cross System used to work on both sides of the armed conflicts, e.g. the battlefield at Solferrino in 1859, or if they can’t stand neutral, their situation will be very risky, because their actions may offend the both sides. (Natsios 1995) Since world countries’ boundaries and sovereignty impose constraints (Diehl, 2005, p3), therefore agreement by all become very hard, agreement need states to cross the boundaries which somehow are very risky for respective states governments, therefore now it is understandable that the contradictions between world states have been the driving forces for the emergence of other forms of organizations, such as UN, World Bank (Note: The UN was founded in 1945 after Second World War to replace the League of Nations, to stop wars between countries, and to provide a platform for dialogue, Diehl 2005, p3;), or other intergovernmental organizations, the emerging NGOs can also fill this hole in the international arena, which can hereby explain the NGO phenomena from the point of view based on the application of the law of contradictions and unification.

　　

　　If we use the knowledge mentioned above and the law of contradiction in things, what can be discovered?

　　

　　When the law of contradiction and unification in things was applied, the author discovered that there are still numerous contradictions in every aspect of society world-widely, though these contradictions were solved mainly by peaceful approaches. However, there are also exceptions, such as 9 ·11 in 2001, terrorism attack is the approach used by terrorists or religious extremists to address the contradictions between the poor, marginalized countries and the rich countries such as America, or the contradictions between different religions, such as Islam and Christian. (Note: NGOs participate in a modernization process on the ‘war on terror’ and also attempting to exert their roles in international laws and enhancing the interdependency with countries union such as EU; Bebbington et al., 2008, p19) To relate the findings to this study, it was discovered that the main contradictions in the 21st century is that the powerful production forces of humans and the limited resources of the Earth, the resultant consequences are the facts that mentioned above in the first paragraph in the introduction chapter, such as the climate change and its derived consequences. As it was stressed by Mao (1937) that different nature of contradictions can only be addressed by approaches of different nature, the contradictions between the humans and nature can be addressed by green movements, while the contradiction between the survival of all humans and the climate death disasters can only be resolved by the alliance of humans and the natural system, in another word, the humans and the nature should collaborate together to fight with the climate change such as humans use the approach of sustainability, adaptation and mitigation (those actions to protect and restore the natural system) thus to enhance the forces of the alliance of natural system and humans, which will possibly be able to combat the climate change and get it under the control of the human societal and natural systems. (Note: The following history events will help readers understand the text mentioned above which can also work as the argument; the contradictions between the communist party and nationalist party in 1930s  caused a lot of  tensions and conflicts between these two parties, however, when there is another even larger contradiction threatening the survival of both these two parties, such as the contradictions between China as a whole nation and Japanese imperialism, the communist party and the nationalist party actually collaborated together to fight with the intrusion of Japanese in the late 1930s and early 1940s, thus the main contradictions determine the subordinate contradictions, afterwards the main contradictions is again between the communist party and the nationalist party, thus the contradictions were solved by civil war from 1945 to 1949; Internationally the Cold War was caused by the main contradictions between two blocs led by two main nations, Soviet Union and US, after Soviet Union collapsed the main contradictions transformed from between Capitalist Bloc and Communist Bloc into the contradictions between US’s one polar hegemony and other nations striving for more power, the same logic goes to humans, nature and climate change, when the main contradictions is the contradictions between the natural system and humans, humans use green movements to approach the contradictions, however, now the main contradictions is between humans, nature and the ‘heaven’ or ‘climate’ which threaten the survival of both the natural system and the humans, humans and nature thus should work together like ‘friends’ to address this contradiction) According to Mao (1937) that in the processes of the development of complicated things contradictions always exist, but there will always one primary contradiction be dominating, and its existence and development determine the existence and development of other contradictions, which means the primary contradiction leads and determines other contradictions, other contradictions are subordinate or secondary to the primary contradiction. In the current world, there are contradictions between developing countries striving for development by over-exploiting the natural system and the already degrading natural system capacity, how to address these issues, yes, there are always contradictions between rich and poor countries, but since the primary contradictions are that the survival of all people in this planet and death threat provided by the climate change, so now we need to look unifications, so what is the unification of all countries, now we can deduct that all countries to survive is the unification, e.g. the collaboration between the rich and the poor countries is the only way to approach the contradiction; Or in another word: even though there are also contradictions between these rich and poor countries, but because these contradictions are not the primary contradiction, thus these contradictions need to be put at the subordinate position, thus the developed countries bloc should collaborate with the developing countries bloc instead, thus the current primary contradiction could possibly be gradually addressed), such as the developed countries offer to finance and provide technological help to these less developed countries with no or little conditions, these developing countries can not keep on making the same mistakes that had been made by the developed countries, or else the natural system in this planet will collapse (Note: according to a study that we need another planet like Earth to satisfy the needs for development), a positive sign is that world governments are working on the way towards the goal of a future of sustainability, however, the failures to reach a legally binding climate change convention made the future grey (Note: the concentration of greenhouse gases should not exceed 350 ppm, but the concentration already reaches 390 ppm, which is the reason why that the natural disasters are becoming more frequent, why the glaciers are melting, why the sea level is rising; Source: 350.orgthat’s way too high, and it’s why ice is melting, drought is spreading, forests are dying that’s way too high, and it’s why ice is melting, drought is spreading, forests are dying). Thus to address all these challenges, the present world system have to adjust to this situation and change,  now we can say that organizations that could provide change for the present international political arena are needed, from this point of view, now we can understand why UN has been reforming, e.g. UN can provide unification or common sense to the world organizations, governments, e.g. the reason that UN has brought the NGOs on board is because NGOs can provide many other approaches that are not suitable for the governments to do and as it was mentioned above that the actions from non-governmental organizations is the approach to deal with the contradictions between the world governments (NGOs can find the unification or commonsense between the world governments, so NGOs can stand neutral between the governments and function as the lubricant to resolve frictions between the world governments or regulatory failures within a government), e.g. the illustration from this figure: there are contradictions between the market and the market failures, the states regulators and the regulatory failures, thus the NGO phenomena appear as new forces to address these contradictions and who may possibly provide other alternatives.

　　

　　A political, economic, social and technological context favorable to NGOs

　　Social movement NGOs

　　Regulators and legislators

　　The market and firms

　　Regulatory failures

　　Market failures

　　3. Generate

　　2. Attempt to address

　　1. Generate

　　4, Attempt to address address

　　

　　Figure 3.1 The market-regulatory- NGO system (Michael et al., 2009, p17)

　　

　　Michael created this figure, but he didn’t find the fundamental driving force for the NGO phenomenon.

　　

　　3.3 On Metabolism

　　

　　Metabolism was generally considered as a concept in biology, but hereby I would love to use this concept in social context. To make it easier understandable, I hereby would like to use a historical approach to interpret, e.g. communism was a new born ideology in 19 century (to avoid misunderstanding I hereby stress that I am not a communist), but after Russia’s October Revolution the communism spread world widely, till 1921 the communist party was established in China, however, compared to the dominating nationalist party was just a new and vulnerable ‘life’, but the international context in those years provided conditions for Mao succeeded in defeating the intrusion of Japan and drove Nationalist Party into Taiwan (Note: however, there had been a huge setback for the communist party in China, in 1927 the communist party was almost defeated by nationalist party and became very weak and small, this setback created a reform inside the party, and after some recovering time during which the communist party learned a lesson from the mistakes then they stood up again), thus the communist party became the dominating party (Mao 1937) which is still the dominating party in mainland China, however, the process did not end since the nationalist party was not completely eliminated either, they both survived due to the international context such as America’ supporting Taiwan, so contradictions are still functioning, however, the nature of an old thing ‘Taiwan’ now have the nature of new things, communist party defeated nationalist party used democracy as propaganda flag, and the failure of nationalist party did make Taiwan become democratic earlier than the mainland China, and the ‘old thing’ Taiwan thus transforms into ‘new things’ while in a larger context the mainland China is actually falling behind in the aspect of democratization due to the delaying political reform which actually make the mainland China currently appears as the nature of old things. The world is thus developing by that the new replace the old, the old transform into the new, or the metabolism brings forth the new through the old. In this case I would like to regard NGOs as a new form of ‘life’ that has grown and is still growing together with the international civil society though it was quite hard for them to exert their roles in authoritarian regimes.

　　

　　Above is our understanding of common matters in nature and society, and then we need to continue studying these new things that had not been in-depth studied, the ‘new NGOs, inter and trans-national civil society phenomenon’ though it has been studied for more than decades, but the studies from a multifaceted view or philosophical approach is still lacking in the literature. From the first chapter of this paper, we know that the influence of NGOs is growing rapidly, so we hereby consider NGOs as an ‘energetic new life’, therefore in finding their positions in the international arena, certain consequences will be produced during the processes. These certain consequences may include creation of new orders in the international regimes. The NGOs and earth system governance as new phenomena thus start their new evolution process, so what is meant by the emergence of a new process? The question can be answered by this quoted text from On Contradictions (Mao, 1937) ‘‘the old unity with its constituent opposites yields to a new unity with its constituent opposites, whereupon a new process emerges to replace the old. The old process ends and the new one starts. The new process contains new contradictions and begins its own history of the development of contradiction and unification.’’

　　

　　Chapter-4 Analysis and Discussion in a larger context

　　

　　4.1 NGOs, civil Society and International Governance

　　

　　Human interaction throughout the planet is not limited by the territorial borders of the states, people travel, communicate, collaborate and build relationships (including inter-racial marriage) across national boundaries, and thus transnational networks were gradually established. As it was written in Young (1997, p 65-84) that nongovernmental organizations have contributed in expanding and strengthening the forces of the global civil society. In fact, the global civil society governing the world order is through the deliberate efforts of politically motivated NGOs or else as the question asked by Edwards (in Bebbington et al., 2008, p43) that how to mobilize a genuinely integrative civil society as apposed to a thin layer of elite NGOs operating in the emerging systems of global governance. The figure 2.1 in conjunction with figure 2.2 can also illustrate that state level NGOs work as the ‘bridge’ between civil society and the governments, while international organizations work as the ‘lubricate’ solving ‘frictions’ or contradictions between world governments or between world public and world governments and according to Diehl (2005, p6) that non-governmental organizations exerted their roles by forming webs or networks that intersect, and supplement those international organizations and world governments, such as UN, and e.g. NGOs are becoming seen as the ideal partners by those agencies of states engaged in transferring their responsibilities to the spheres of civil society and NGOs (who together are considered as ‘third sector’) .

　　

　　As it was claimed by Olson (1965) that the complex environmental issues confront us now such as climate change and the barriers to establish effective governance are far more severe than expected.

　　

　　Here the question comes, how can the global environment be safeguarded in the absence of better and efficient global governance beyond states level?

　　

　　And what is the fundamental driving force for the emerging earth system governance phenomena?

　　

　　Globalization includes not only economic globalization but also environmental issues globalization, climate issues globalization, politics globalizations.

　　

　　Martin (1990) defines globalization as the processes by which the people of the world are incorporated into a single world society, a global society while the definition of Cox (1994) is that ‘‘The characteristics of the globalization trend include the internationalizing of production, the new international division of labor, new migratory movements from South to North’, the new competitive environment that accelerates these processes, and the internationalizing of states (…) making states into agencies of the globalizing world’’. And according to section 3.2 the understanding the law of contradictions in the contradictions between the world governments and also the contradictions between the natural system and humans, we can claim that the fundamental driving force for the emerging earth system governance is the combination of the primary contradictions and many other subordinate contradictions, such as the primary contradiction is the contradiction between humans, nature and the ‘climate’, other contradictions such as the contradictions between world governments (power race, US, EU, China, India, Japan, Russia), the contradictions between the increasing demand for food, clean water, and other prerequisite materials or life security and the food shortage, drought, more frequent natural disasters, global terrorism, and it is these contradictions that move forward the transformation of the present political system into a new world system that can provide better earth system governance. Further more, all these challenges that we humans face now need global collaboration and solidarity, including the rich countries that provide financial and technological support to the poor and developing countries. Here is an inspiring case, in the Chinese history, when the main contradictions are between communist party and nationalist party, they have been fighting both violently and peacefully, however, they joined alliance when Japan intruded China in 1930s, and the logic goes to the world governments, because there are the contradictions between world governments, thus the world governments compete with each other both peacefully (mainstream) and violently (Now military interference is gradually out of date among large nations, though regionally conflicts, such as those military conflicts in Africa, Middle East, still exist), however, in 21st century the main contradiction is between humanity and ‘heaven’ (climate change, disaster….) thus there is only one way to make sure that the security of all humans on this planet is that all the people and governments work together with the natural systems to fight with the climate change and other life threatening issues, which means all the states are now standing in the same ‘boat’, to help each other is the best way to secure and save all the humans  in the ‘boat’.

　　

　　So far we’ve been talking about many aspects of contradictions, we have seen unification between NGOs and UN and it seems that there are no contradictions between NGOs and UN? Is this true?

　　

　　We have seen unification between UN and NGOs not only in the aspect of environmental issues but also in many aspects in international society, e.g. ‘‘in the aspect of peacekeeping, UN have worked with those relevant regional organizations including NGOs (Stedman in Mellbourn 2005, p55) and UN’s collaborating with Africa Union in peace and security agenda (Michel in Mellbourn 2005, p67)’’. And the answer of the second question is no, as we answer it based on our understanding of the law of contradiction and unification, since contradictions are in every thing and every phenomenon. The UN has being progressive in taking NGOs on board, but the ‘marriage’ between UN and NGOs is based on the contemporary needs of both, instead of being based on a ‘genuine’ love, e.g. UN is striving for more power and influence, instead of being played by big powers as ‘football’ while NGOs seek for capacity building and growth (NGOs also feel that they are the ‘football’ of UN, since obvious NGOs were treated as subordinates and being inferior), the other contradictions are making NGOs hard to get along with UN which have caused the resentment by UN agencies of NGOs when they don’t act as it was expected by UN agencies, the contradictions are listed as follows, e.g. two sets of institutions compete for limited financial support; one’s management is more centralized, the other is very decentralized; One is more feudal, while the others has more freedom; one dare to take risky or radical approaches, but the other has too much trepidation. Thus if we continue to use the ‘marriage’ metaphor mentioned above, UN and NGOs have potential for a ‘divorce’. Moreover, even within the NGOs network there are still contradictions, e.g. NGOs are not united as a solid union, but each one of them are peacefully fighting and competing, and most of them are reluctant to cede managerial autonomy towards the goal of greater strategic coherence and unification by UN, thus solidarity and managerial efficiency account for NGOs’ weaknesses, stronger voice or single voice, and collective actions are not expected by the world public (Natsios 1995 in Diehl 2005, p391), which can also be the reason that NGOs’ influences are still marginalized by states, until now NGOs still don't have formal decision-making power, e.g. voting rights in decision-makings. The loyalty of NGOs may sometimes be suspected by UN agencies, since they don’t have the legally binding contract in conjunction with that NGOs also want to maintain their ‘ego’ and ‘autonomy’, however, it was also claimed by Natsios (1995) that in the chaos of complex emergencies NGOs and UN agencies stand in the same boat and who need each other more than they are willing to admit (Note: UN need NGOs to link world people from a diversity of territorial entities while NGOs need UN to provide a platform for playing their roles: Alger 1996). The complex relationships between NGOs and UN can be indicated by the motivations and intentions of NGOs’ actively participating in the Earth Summits, as it was claimed by Prof. Sérgio Mattos-Fonseca (2010, April, 22nd) and Emily Adler (2010, April, 28th) that the intentions that NGOs participate UN Earth Summits can include: Improve environmental quality; Seek opportunities of making potential contacts, networks and cooperations; Communicate and discuss climate change issues with world-wide scholars; Let the employees have more experiences of international conferences which may stimulate the motivations of some employees; Stimulate debate or dialogue; Lobby the influential decision-makers; Attend the conference and made voice heard; Develop policy; To attempt to influence the negotiation processes; To gain political support/agenda setting; To join the UN family and help to strengthen the power and influence of UN; Inform, raise awareness, understanding; To observe through participation; Capacity building of the organization; Report back on progress or experience; Develop research agenda; Promote business or seek for applying UN funding.                                                     

　　

　　If we stand on the side of UN, UN’s getting worldwide NGOs on board is a strategic decision for UN’s capacity building and reforming process! For further strengthening the power and influence of UN and power struggle with states governments, NGOs are the strategic partners for UN to get wider support from international and transnational civil society.

　　

　　In the aspect of how to more effectively govern the Earth systems, do the Earth Citizens really need a larger ‘world government’?

　　

　　To face the challenges in 21st century mentioned above all the countries need to work together, which is the only chance that we humans can get the climate change and its derived negative consequences under the control. We have more than 190 countries in this planet, if each one of them wants to go to different direction, then where the planet will head (remember the metaphor mentioned above, the planet hereby as a rocket, and more than 190 countries hereby as more than 190 aeronauts)? The failures of reaching a legally binding climate change convention for so many years are because of the decades of contradictions between the North and the south, the East and the West, the Rich and the Poor countries, and the relatively weak power of the United Nations, thus to speed up the negotiations processes the power of the United Nations need to be strengthened, larger, deeper and systematic reforms need to be carried out in the coming decades. Further more, according to Biermann (2006, p12) that the challenges and uncertainties of earth system governance can only be addressed by the collaboration between the states governments, international organizations (e.g. UN), and non-governmental actors such as NGOs. Biermann (2006, p13) claimed that the power of earth system government is required to be partially above the states, which could exert limitations to the autonomy of individual state behaviors and which also exert elements of a post-sovereign governance architecture that cares and expresses the interests of the governments, civil society and non-governmental actors. The globalization is an inevitable historical trend, which provides both the opportunities and threats (e.g. the threats caused by climate change and other environmental issues are crossing all the nations) to all humans, to tackle all these threats, achieving more effective global governance is needed (UNDP, 1999). The pace of technological change (in computers and internet) and globalization is accelerating, thus we must update our ways of thinking and doing things accordingly. (Mendez 1997) There is a proposal (from two former members of UN Secretariat with long work experience) that a UN Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA) should be established because of their belief that ‘‘NGOs cannot fully and adequately represent ‘we, the peoples of UN’’’, go far back till 1945, Ernest Bevin claimed that a world assembly elected directly from the people of the world as a whole. (Childers and Urquhart, 1999) However, there hasn’t much progress been made in the aspect of transforming this notion into reality, due to the complex circumstances in world politics. And according to Friman (2010) that the rising forces of NGOs challenging the current international system, in UNFCCC, is basically a positive trend (Friman personally believe so), yet NGOs' influence partly depend on resources making it hard for ENGOs to compete with e.g. BINGOs and sometimes RINGOs etc. And on the aspect of that for more efficient international governance, will a larger ‘world government’ beyond the level of states be needed? The answer is yes from (Mathias, 2010). On the question, with UN’s enhancing or its continuing collaboration with WTO, World Bank, IMF..., in conjunction with uniting the forces from worldwide NGOs, IOs, global civil society, governments, and other multil-actors, can these evolving forces provide better global governance? For this issue, Mathias (2010) claimed that it is possible and the trend is also positive. However, the fundamental weaknesses of UN system is that the gap between the people of the world and the UN system herself, thus the UN hasn’t been functioning as the ‘genuine world government’, therefore reforming the UN system in conjunction with getting more and more NGOs on board will shorten this gap, so to say: if UN could win the heart of the people of the world, UN together with her alliances can possibly provide a ‘genuine world governance’.

　　

　　The idea is that if peace could be secured within an established state territory, then if a world government could be established, then military forces could also be governed under the monopoly of the world government (Tännsjö, 2008, p1).

　　

　　In a word, the ‘Earth Government’ is both needed and possibly to be established (no matter it is Biermann’s world government or Childers and Urquhart’s UNPA).

　　

　　4.2 UN centered IOs and Earth System Governance

　　

　　The contradictions between states can cover many aspects, territorial boundary contradictions, sea area boarder contradictions, other common heritage e.g. deep seabed minerals, Amazon forest, Sahara desert, ocean resources, mountain glaciers and so many aspects on the Earth. Thus to solve all these contradictions, a larger and more effective governance over the whole planet is necessary, e.g. functional interdependence phenomenon relates to the interdependence of natural subsystems that links, e.g., climate change to biodiversity or land degradation (Note: based on the analysis of Denman et al., (2007) and a discussion content with Professor Bo Svensson (2009) that the anthropogenic activities has negative influence on the ecosystem, the degrading ecosystem will cause the loss of biodiversity, the loss of biodiversity will decrease of the capacity of ecosystem, the decreasing ecological capacity will make the ecosystem have less capacity to uptake the greenhouse cases which in return impacted the climate change, thus the whole planet is a holistic and integrative system, any change in this large system will have feedbacks on other related system, vice versa, through circling the subsystem thus influence the whole earth system) as well as to the interdependence of social systems and international or regional political arenas (Biermann 2006, p9), since the economic crises (contradictions between overspending in free market and insufficient financial system in states macro-regulation and control) or mass migration (contradictions between less satisfactory and more chances for security, freedom, work, democracy…) will affect all nations since the systematic ecological interdependence binds all the nations, in another word, the social system could transform environmental degradation into trans-regional or global social, economic and political crises (e.g. environmental security, water scarcity, food shortage will all bring challenge to the current international political regimes).

　　

　　So far, in the international arena the United Nations though not powerful enough but who may have the potential in achieving earth system governance (covering both the natural system and human society) by involving more and more institutions, corporations, NGOs, other helping forces (Diehl 2005, p6). In fact, IMF, WTO (e.g. the increasing subjugation of foreign economic policy to juridical decisions by the World Trade Organization) (Biermann 2006, p13), and UN organizations do have capacities for providing conditions for achieving earth system governance, regarding the legislative function of earth system governance, e.g. governments have accepted in the Montreal ozone protocol binding majority decisions on the adjustment of the timetable for the phase-out of regulated substances (Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer 1987, article 2.9). As it is known by all that there are still many developing countries, authoritarian regimes, dictatorship states, or locked up countries existing in this planet, thus more universal values (such as freedom, democracy, human rights, humanitarian spirits and other ‘common concern of humankind’ values) and new norms that can be easily accepted by large are needed. Therefore, the earth system governance that can provide these values and norms (for the survival of all nations, these nations need to jump out of the ‘box’ of narrow nationalist interest) are needed. In fact, in 1995 the commission on Global Governance involving 28 world leaders and seven core values were listed as follows: Respect for life, liberty, justice, equity, mutual respect, caring and integrity, later on the Commission proposed a ‘global civic ethic’ based on the notion of balancing rights and responsibilities (ODI, 1992). In the aspect of norms and values creation, UN and its multilateral networks will enable the creation of values and norms that emerge from the UN-centered process of global governance. (Johnstone 2003)

　　

　　As it was claimed by Biermann (2006, p14) that these norms are also required to be enforceable, e.g. for the security of all, any government that opposes the nuclear non-proliferation should be faced by serious sanctions from a larger earth system governance norms. G8, G20, NATO, EU, all these alliances can not represent all the countries in this planet, especially those marginalized countries or those islands that are most easily impacted by the sea level rise, agreements only by these alliances will create more conflicts between these alliances and those countries who are not on board yet, e.g. the already tensions between the new, key-emitter group and smaller countries underscore the need for a governance structure that recognizes a voice for all interested parties. (Hultman 2010) Thus the international system governance need to be provided by the kind of representing organizations that are willing to benefit or express the interests for all countries, up till now, UN, World Bank, IMF (Note: According to Mendez 1997 that IMF policy has been dictated by central bankers and treasury officials of G-10, to whom the world’s needs are subject. However, with the developing countries’ fighting for more voice and more rights in IMF, a reform called for by BRIC has been carried out, IMF has granted key members in G-20 more share and voting rights, well, since there has been more than a decade that the IMF and World Bank both have been reformed and developed, but the shadow of these issues are still existing), WTO are most influential in this aspect (Note: According to Oran Young, 1997, that international organizations provide important administrative services during agenda setting and other international negotiations, moreover, when these negotiations take place, these international organizations can provide secretarial support and drafting the reports of the negotiation sessions, in fact, in the international negotiation arena many norms were developed by these international organizations) that concern the interests of most countries and regions though the UN has gone though the suffering due to some scandals and other internal and outside reasons. And also the existence of WTO, G7, and G20 (by bodies which large and influential countries control) actually weakened the power and influence of UN, e.g. due to the fact that the UN downturn role-playing in 1990s (Valorie, 2007) and the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the G-20 was established to address the financial issue and to stabilize the global financial market, when the financial crisis spread all across the globe in 2008 the G-20 was called upon to further strengthen international cooperation and address the crisis, (G-20 homepage, 2010) during which the UN has been marginalized by this power club.

　　

　　Thus the question arises, should the UN play larger role or does UN have the capacity to play larger role?

　　

　　According to ODI (1992) that three conditions must be considered for answering this question, namely, a) a clear understanding of the different roles the UN should play; b) an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the UN in fulfilling those roles; and c) a programme of reform which will equip the UN to play its part.

　　

　　In the aspect of what roles that UN should play, ODI (1992, p3) listed the following traditional roles have proposed by the UN:

　　

　　• Research on cross-cutting issues

　　• Consensus-building, advocacy, and target-setting

　　• A forum for the preparation and negotiation of international treaties or conventions

　　• Technical co-ordination and standard-setting

　　• Information collection and dissemination

　　• Co-ordination of action among agencies, both national and international.

　　• Direct action (development, peace-keeping)

　　

　　Well, these traditional roles have been developed and evolved, but the new forms of roles are based on or evolved from these traditions. According to Natsios (1995) UN is much more familiar with central government bureaucracies and public services than NGOs, thus the UN has relatively long and more experience in playing important international roles, which can account for her advantages.

　　

　　In the aspect of the strengths and weaknesses of the UN: ODI (1992, p3) listed them as follows:

　　

　　Strengths, the UN Charter cleared the mission of UN, to represent the universal virtue and value, to advocate the world public and governments, to enhance its political authority in certain circumstances, to involve expertise and multilateral actors.

　　

　　Weaknesses, lack of trust due the internal causes and external causes, internal reasons, political and bureaucratic issues (e.g. sex scandal, corruption) inside UN body, the shortage of financial resource (in the past, USA delayed the membership fee due to the fact that UN opposed the will of USA in certain issues, the peace maintenance need large amount of finance, in fact, the costs of UN headquarters in New York, main offices and regional commissions in Addis Ababa, Amman, Bangkok, Geneva, Nairobi, Santiago and Vienna and other 70 UN information offices across the world as well many social and development programs, e.g. refugees, environmental issues, poverty reductions; Resource: Mendez 1997). Moreover, the payments are usually late due to the fact that there are no penalties for late payments, other serious issues are from the behaviors (states play ‘hard to get’ by withholding the payments or other forms of using the power of ‘purse’ to keep UN weak, off-balance or other downsizing reforms; Source: Mendez 1997 in Diehl 2005, p173) of the member states. The external causes are possibly from the reality that a certain number of developing countries are uncertain about the roles that the UN play, they suspected that UN was the ‘puppet’ of those developed countries in conjunction with the fact that UN headquarter office was located at US, so it could be more easily controlled by US in certain ways. Moreover, according to Luck (2004) that there is no central coordinating organization that could exercise effective control over a certain number of the UN programmes. Secondly, the so called Secretary-General lacks the power either of the purse or authority in dealing with the specialized agencies, and in the aspect of roles of UN to the publics and Member States, to whom UN must rely on persuasion, personality and indirect appeals to exercise a sense of direction and coherence to the system as a whole (Senate Report p.18), the roles of UN have surely evolved and developed during the past decades, but in the aspect of power exercising, these mentioned issues haven’t changed much, and according to Luck (2004) that there is no center at the center of UN system.

　　

　　In the aspect of reforming the UN system, ODI (1992, p4) proposed 3 options and the most ambitious one is that the third option as follows, the UN should recognize the need for a new international political system to improve the global governance, which might include: qualified majority voting in the Security Council; a smaller and more strategic Economic and Social Council working in parallel with the Security Council and with similar procedures, bringing more Agencies under the direct control of Secretary General; greater accountability to the UN of the World Bank and the IMF, the combination of both improved accountability and greater effectiveness offers an attractive win-win option for all nations. In empowering the United Nations, drawn the analysis from Alger (1996) that solidarity of the people of UN should be strengthened; the international inequities in UN system should not continue stay still; more agencies of UN system should be involved for the long term capacity building.

　　

　　The aspects mentioned above are to answer the question ‘should the UN play larger role?’ In fact, from 1990s till now, the UN has improved in many aspects, the strengths have been enhanced, and the weaknesses have been partially overcome (since the UN learned many lessons from those mistakes). However, in the aspect of financial reform, the methods of financing the UN and global governance have been falling behind though the world has changed radically in the last fifty years (Mendez 1997). As the fact that the emerging number of NGOs and other organizations join the UN family has actually enhanced the power and strengths of the United Nations. And according to Biermann (2006, p11) that stable enough earth system governance is needed to sustain the changes in the world political systems. In return the more powerful United Nations system in conjunction with the global civil society forces will provide conditions for effective global adaptive governance of large-scale earth system transformations during the 21st century (Note: David Held recognizes that “new” voices of an emergent “transnational civil society” claim the establishment of new modes of international power systems, which helps providing conditions for a cosmopolitan democracy). And according to Ban Ki-moon (Secretary-General) that "Every day we are reminded of the need for a strengthened United Nations, as we face a growing array of new challenges, including humanitarian crises, human rights violations, armed conflicts and important health and environmental concerns. Seldom has the United Nations been called upon to do so much for so many. I am determined to breathe new life and inject renewed confidence into a strengthened United Nations firmly anchored in the twenty-first century, and which is effective, efficient, coherent and accountable." In a word, UN internally is willing to strive for more power, influence, and leadership beyond the states, and the pressure from the crises and challenges all externally claim UN to shoulder more responsibility in the future, but according to Kofi Annan that reform is a process, not only consists one or two simple actions but a multitude of tasks and issues that must be pursued and addressed over the necessary time. (Luck 2004)

　　

　　As it was claimed by Biermann (2006, p25) that politics was about dealing with people, distribution of resources, values and long-term credible, stable and inclusive earth system governance requires the agreement of all stakeholders that the allocation of costs and benefits is fair. I hereby would say that all the efforts need to be done by people so to achieve more efficient earth system governance, thus earth system governance is no difference to politics. If UN could empower herself by allying with more other organizations such as WTO, IMF, World Bank (In fact, several environmental agreements were facilitated by appointing UNEP as secretariat and World Bank as financial administrator, Abbott 1998, p33-34), NGOs, Corporations, Institutions, international civil society, these efforts thus can enhance achieving more efficient international governance, then a fairer and more credible distribution of resources and values could possibly be achieved easier. On the aspect of accountability, UN Branch, UNFCCC have contributed in the legal liability of states and who also have exerted certain limitations on its stakeholders, e.g. world governments. However, these international regimes will face lots of obstacles in the way, since lots of realist theory finds it is naive in treating international regimes as serious political entities, moreover, realists believe that states will never cede to their respective institutions that provide strong enforcement capacities that keep the society in control and order, thus to avoid international anarchy (Abbott 1998) since it will only create chaos and instability. In fact, according to Abbott (1998) states are able to achieve goals that they can’t accomplish in the anarchy status or on a decentralized basis by taking advantage of the centralization and independence of international organizations.

　　

　　Here the law of contradictions function again, the contradictions between the power of UN and the power of the states, because if the UN is too powerful, some country will not be very ‘happy’ (e.g. in 2002 the secretary-general made it clear that the military actions should be based on UN’s new security council resolution for the respect of international law and the unique legitimacy provided by UN (Johnstone 2003), but the US unilaterally broke it in 2003 anyway), if the UN is too weak, some countries, especially those marginalized countries need UN to express their interests will not be ‘happy’ either (According to Abbott 1998, in Diehl 2005, p54: since the issues of power and distribution are pervasive, states are wary of granting too much autonomy to IOs), however, in reality the UN is growing with the strategy involving the world civil society and worldwide corporations such as NGOs that could provide moral and power support (In fact, UN has managed to make worldwide NGOs more energetic in mobilizing citizens within their states and cross states to more creatively support UN efforts on key global issues, e.g. if NGOs want to be accredited to attend UNFCCC negotiation conferences, these NGOs need to direct their agendas to climate change actions required by NU system: Paoletto and Schroeder, 1997) and corporations that could possibly provide financial support (e.g. by donations or sponsoring, in fact, dominating commercial interests were acting in the dark during the earth summit, commercial sponsoring Rio conference was an official case, many multinational corporations were directly or indirectly involved in the decision process during the preparations of the conferences, according to Björk in Peter 2004, p39), thus the membership fee from the states will not only be the sole financial resource for the UN annual budget since UN need larger budget to deal with the challenges world-widely, e.g. peace keeping, fighting with the climate change…, as it was stressed in the first chapter of this paper, supporters and the amount of available financial resources matter to the power and influence of an organization, therefore if UN could manage to get more supporters and financial resources, it helps the growth and development of UN, in fact there are already many proposals that have been written by scholars, especially by those Nordic groups, e.g. 1) tax-exempt national committees mobilize financial support from foundations, charity groups, private corporations, as well donations from individuals (In fact, many UN organizations have already attracted a moderate proportion of budget from individual donations; e.g. UNICEF). 2) Income earners such as credit-card sponsorship that was promoted by Netherlands. 3) Governmental voluntary contributions toward releasing the financial shortages in the regular budget, voluntary donation governments should be credited in the way of recognition. These proposals sound good, but since the rising power of UN and the nationalist interest of States will create new contradictions, some small countries maybe willing to donate budget to UN, but they are afraid the possible sanctions from those powerful countries if these powerful countries’ strategy is to downsizing play the power of UN, e.g. ‘money purse’ playing. Here another question comes, it is understandable that many influential countries still have a lot of internal financial issues, but if these big powers are willing to provide more budget to UN, it will not be a big problem for them (Compared the UN system annual budget $5 billion (GPF, 2009) to the thousands of billion dollars of states, and the $10.5 billion system budget in 1992, not including IBRD and IMF, was only 0.07% of the budgets of 24 industrial countries, the total number of the staff 51,484 was no larger than the civil servants in a city of a medium-sized country; Alger 1996 in Diehl 2005, p492), but why these countries don’t want to provide large amount of financial support to UN (but some marginalized countries actually funded UN agencies for certain programmes: GPF 2009)? This can be a tricky question, one of the possible reasons can be that since UN’s headquarters is in America, and thus UN’s decision-making is largely subject to the attitudes of America, if some country surprisingly grants large amount of financial support to UN, their intentions even for good purposes will still be world-widely questioned, especially by America. Another reason can possibly because of that some countries oppose other countries to get permanent seats in UN Security Council, since these countries may worry about that if UN has too much financial resource, it might be much easier for UN to lobby and mobilize for reforming the UN and UN’s self-capacity empowering which may against some countries nationalist interests. Moreover, if we stand on the side UN, the other options for UN to empower herself is to get more influential countries on the board of Security Council, e.g. as it is known that Japan is willing to get on board of permanent seats and even willing to pay large amount of finance in order to get a position which of course could share the financial burden for UN, but due to historical reasons there are a certain number of countries (for historical and realistic reasons) appose Japan’ seeking to obtain the permanent seat, it will be very hard for Japan to get the position, however, with the improvement of diplomatical relationship between these countries and Japan, it is highly possible that India, Japan, Germany will be members of Security Council in the coming decade or decades.

　　

　　The contradictions between the states and the environmental and other urgent issues crossing the states move the states to enhance their adaptive capacity to these issues by evolving into an adaptive state, within these states there are still contradictions such as the contradictions between the decreased autonomy and increased dependence within the states, the contradictions between the new forces in finding their positions claiming for change in the conventional political regimes, however, according to the law of metabolism the rules are set up by the new dominating powers such as the level of interdependence between states keep growing, these states adaptively form new rules, and these states need to follow these rules, e.g. UNFCCC contain the rules that need to be followed by the states who have ratified the convention. Based on the analysis above it is reasonable to say that the UN has the advantages to play larger role in earth system governance in the future. Further more, Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, since then America has been leading the world in many aspects, the world appear as one-polar for many decades, however, with powers and influence from China, India, Brazil, Russia, (BRIC) and other forms of alliances keep on growing, America will gradually moving away from ‘number one’ thus the world moves into a phase of world of multi-polar, which make the world affairs even more complicated. Therefore, to better address these world affairs and issues, international organizations need to play larger roles. The current international system are providing many arenas for states, international organizations, and NGOs, corporations to develop and grow, as it was mentioned above as long as the players keep on playing in the arena, sooner or later there will be losers and winners, the winners set new rules (Note: the rules made of the conquest are defined by dominant economics and public management disciplines, particular imperial powers, by those who have violence forces, by those who have preferential access to the means of media and communication; Bebbington 2008, p31), e.g. after America defeated Soviet Union, the rules have been mainly set by the western world, in the sphere of international organizations, there are WTO, World Bank (Note: According to Luck 2004 that the World Bank should work as the chief arm of the UN system), UN, NATO (Note: NATO was established basically a manifestation of the bipolar distribution of power in Europe during the cold war and was considered as the tool of America for balancing power against Soviet Union, however, the international context has changed, the current situation of NATO is facing two choices: disappear or get adapted in the new distribution and balance of power, Mearsheimer 1995 in Diehl 2005, p64), G-20, EU, IMF…, these organizations are also peacefully fighting and competing, well, thanks to the competition that provided the opportunities for enhancing the capacity for all these organizations, however, with the competition and fighting for leadership, sooner or later there will be a dominating organization alliance leading the other organizations, will this organization be UN or alliance of UN and others, these are all about politics, so we don’t know, but the history is forwarding by the new world order takes the place of the old world order (Note: Here is a possible forecast, IMF functions as ‘National Bank’, WTO functions as ‘Finance Ministry’,  UNEP transforms into an organization functions as ‘Environment Ministry’…, in future larger ‘world government’, though this is only a forecast, but UN allying with other international organizations, world governments and world civil society is the necessary ‘bridge’ towards ‘large world government’, though according to Diehl (2005, p3)the calls for a world government is naive), which is the so called social metabolism.

　　

　　In fact, no matter UN, World Governments, World NGOs, each one of them is called ‘organization’ and who also has the universal characteristics of an ‘organization’, the differences are their size scale, supporters, resources, power and influence gap. A country is an organization but who is comprised by many sub-organizations e.g. agencies and institutions. Any of these organizations, if they could be strong and powerful enough, they can be even transformed into a party, even a government, e.g. green parties in Europe, some of them in the first place was just an small organization. UN was a relatively smaller scale league when it was established. In China, Communist Party was just comprised by a certain number of people (another example: Mao founded Hunan communist branch, in the beginning only has three people), but now it is a predominant party in the country and the largest party in the world. The reason that UN brought NGOs on board is because UN is also striving for more power and influence, since the number of supporters matter a lot to the power and influence of the organization; UN is continuing the reform that could bring her back on the international ‘stage’, historically UN has been marginalized by the world governments for many times (UN has lost influence after 1964 while IMF, World Bank and NATO has enhanced their power, Nilsson 2004, p40). Well, let’s say if UN could win the heart of the world, then UN has the potential to play the leading role in the evolving ‘world government’, well, it may takes many decades. However, UN can also totally fail, once it loses support of the world public and Member States, because UN has competitors, e.g. G-20, and other international organizations, if UN makes the same serious mistakes that have been made in 1990s (sex scandal, feudal corruption, oil for food). This is metabolism in social context, now we get back to the section 3.3 of On Metabolism in this paper, the world is thus functioning as the new replaces the old, and the old turns new again, and thus the circling last forever. The NGOs networks thus have the potential to challenge the UN system. However, the processes of the creation of new international regimes or new world orders, or the new form of ‘Earth Government’ takes rather long time, even the ‘Genuine Earth Government’ would finally be established, she still needs rather long time to grow till become legal, formal, strong and powerful, e.g. it takes long time for the ‘new’ democracy takes the place of ‘old’ dictatorship and the democratization can even turn its direction backwards, e.g. the democratization in France, after the congress was established, Napoleon came back as the ‘Emperor’, and the same processes has been gone through by many other western countries, e.g. Britain, Germany and some eastern European countries. Thus it can be inferred out that the democracy needs conditions to be established and time to grow (India, Thailand’ Democracy is not as effective as America). (Xin Hao Nian, Youtube, 2009), the same logic goes to the creation of ‘Earth government’ or ‘Planet Government’, it needs rather long time to create conditions (e.g. universal values, norms, global financial reform, more dependence between world governments, the unification and solidarity of organizations beyond states level), even when the conditions are available, it still need to face the difficulties stand in the way of world-wide reform, in the beginning of the creation of this ‘Earth Union’, the ‘life’ of which will still be fragile for long time, e.g. the idea from British Prime Minister Churchill of establishing a United States of Europe started in September 1946. In fact the thought of unification of Europe emerged as early as medieval time, Frankish Empire and the Holy Roman had the ambition to unite many parts of Europe together, afterwards, the king of Bohemia proposed the Christian countries to establish a Christian union, after the independence of America the thought of establishing a United States of Europe emerged, and after hundreds of years’ accumulation of necessary conditions, finally, European Union has established in 1993; (Baibu, Baike, 2010) and also it can be inferred out that it takes the necessary time to transform the idea into reality, in fact the creation of an idea or thought also has its evolutionary processes. However, even EU is already 17 yeas old but EU is still a kind of ‘organization’ than a genuine form of governmentality above states level, e.g. EU still does not have the power to stand with one single voice on behalf of all member states to deal with diplomatic issues, just as Germany or France are not willing to give EU that much power due to many considerations (Can Kao Xiao Xi, 2009). The relative success of EU has many implications on the processes of establishing a world government. Therefore the establishment of a ‘world government’ is possible, but the processes will only be harder than the ‘birth’ of EU.

　　

　　UN is a very important international organization, who has played many important roles during the past many decades. During the processes of her development and growth, she has gone through many setbacks, failures, other forms of sufferings; it has been treated as ‘football’ and played by world big powers. But UN has the potential for playing larger role in this 21st century, not only because UN herself is getting stronger during the past decades’ ‘suffering survival training’, but the international challenges also need UN to play larger role instead of being marginalized (According to Mendez 1997 that with the end of bipolarity and the increasing big-power dependence on the UN in conjunction with the ongoing reform in UN system, a genuine change and reform is possible), but there will continual power contradictions between the UN and the world governments.  According to Mendez (1997 in Diehl 2005, p187) that UN and the international public sector will play key roles for the new world order and effective global governance.

　　

　　The discussions above can be the explanation that why the ‘earth system government’ is needed and why the UN in conjunction with other world-widely influential organizations will move the earth system governance issues forward.

　　

　　4.3 International Regimes and Global Governance

　　

　　Mao expressed his views in ‘On Contradictions (1937)’ that the particular things is united with the universal things and since the fact that inside everything there are both the particularity and universality of contradiction,  universality thus reside in particularity.

　　

　　So what are the interrelations between the universal and the particular?

　　

　　Mao answered this question in On Contradictions (1937) as follows:

　　

　　The relationship between the universality and particularity of contradictions is the inter-relationship between the ‘general character’ and the ‘individual character’ of contradiction. The general character is that contradiction exists in and runs from the beginning to the end through all processes, which is a universal truth admitting of no exception for all times and all countries, thus contradiction is motion, is processes, is things, is thoughts. If we deny contradiction means we deny everything, thus we call it the general character or the absoluteness of contradiction. However, the very general character is contained in every individual character, without individual character there will be no general character, e.g. every person is different because of their own identity, and every person is also similar because of the general character that they have, if we remove all these individual identities, where can the general character stay?  Obviously, without general character, the individual character couldn't exist either. Because of the fact that each contradiction is special thus the individual character arises. However, contrary to the general character, all individual character exists conditionally and temporarily and hence is relative (Note: e.g. if we observe this in real life, every human is different but their longevity only lasts decades, but the humans will continue breeding thus maintain their general character forever). This truth about the general character, individual character, relativity and absoluteness is the essence of the issue of contradictions in things and to fail to understand it is equal to abandon dialectics.

　　

　　According to Young (1997) that the complex mixes of characteristics within international regimes are common, but individual regimes have their identical characteristics, e.g. on the aspect of formulation of rules or behavioral prescriptions, procedures for reaching collective choices, collaborations, innovative thinking on issues, and on the aspect of strengths evolution over time. However, according to my understanding of the law of contradictions and unification, the individual characteristics are also inherent in the universal characteristics, e.g. as it was discussed in Young (1997, 278) that individual regimes are often connected to the overarching institutional arrangements or integrated into larger and broader regimes. 

　　

　　So far, we have talked about the rising forces, such as NGOs, Global Civil Society, and as it was claimed by Young (1997, p284) that these forces can exert considerable pressure on international regimes (where nonstate actors play significant roles) which continual their influences on the operations of those transnational regimes where states members have important roles to play. 

　　

　　

　　Chapter 5 Conclusion

　　

　　

　　5.1 Fundamental driving force for NGOs, civil society and earth system governance phenomena

　　

　　Up till now and through out the history, humans tried to address issues concern their survival, but no perfect systems have been created. The law of contradictions and unification is constantly addressing issues and creating new issues, thus maintain its functioning forever. Environmental issues, e.g. climate change threat has crossed all boundaries of the human world, thus to address these issues, cross-boundary approaches need to be applied, but unfortunately, the history need to take its necessary course, thus the failures of governmental regulations, market economy based on exploiting natural resources are draining the earth dry. Thus for the sake of protecting the earth from degrading, and for the survival of the present and future generations, new ‘life form’(whose way of thinking are different from the mainstream political systems and who have the capacity to attract enough supporters) need to be created.

　　

　　To be continued……

　　

　　With the history moves forward, the threat of climate change and the survival for all has become the primary contradiction, thus to address this primary contradiction, the contradictions between the humans and natural world need to be subordinate to this primary contradiction, therefore the collaboration between human world and natural world is strongly needed for survival of the both of these two systems. The earth system governance phenomenon thus emerged to address this primary contradiction.  

　　

　　5.2 Interrelationships between NGOs, UN centered IOs, Civil Society, states

　　

　　There are contradictions between these NGOs, UN centered IOs: e.g. UN has its own way of thinking and dealing with issues, so are the NGOs. Therefore there are sometimes UN agencies and NGOs cannot reach agreements that are satisfactory to both. But unification between NGOs and UN is the mainstream interaction; they both need each other more than they want to admit. Especially when big powers holdback their member fees, UN doesn't have enough financial resources to carry out its actions, since UN’s reform is not complete jet. In this aspect, NGOs relatively have more freedom, since the projects carried out by NGOs are relatively small scale and the financial budget is not that large like UN, thus to get NGOs on board is to empower UN system. In fact, NGOs are not only approaching UN, but also other IOs, e.g. World Bank, which can also provide guidance and financial support for NGOs, this kind of multilateral relationships can be very complex, since Word Bank also support many UN progrmmes, and all these different level of institutions, organizations, governmental agencies are connected by NGOs.

　　

　　NGOs are closely connected to civil society, since civil society is the ‘life source’ of NGOs, which also provide the platform for NGOs to play. Like NGOs, civil society has also become transnational and international, which hence enhances the roles that NGOs play globally.

　　

　　In democratic countries, NGOs have more freedom to play their roles even their interests are sometimes against the governments, but these democratic countries have enough capacity to tolerate and adjust the NGOs’ actions as long as NGOs’ playing is not against law. But on contrary, the situation of NGOs in developing countries still relatively immature and lack of autonomy due to the control and regulation from the governments, this situation can be worse especially in authoritarian regimes. But with the democratization of the developing countries over time, the NGOs still have large space and capacity to grow, thus the international NGOs and civil society will become even more influential, thus a new wave of worldwide green revolution will be very possible.

　　

　　5.3 Consequences of a stronger global NGO network system

　　

　　With the expanding networks of NGOs, will the current political systems be challenged?

　　

　　The answer will be yes.

　　

　　If so, can the NGOs, civil society in conjunction with UN and other international or intergovernmental organizations help address the contemporary issues in global governance?

　　

　　It will create new issues and even intense tensions between world governments and these NGOs alliances. But if the radical approaches can be avoided and instead by numerous negotiations, more efficient global governance will highly possible be achieved.

　　

　　In a word, NGOs are the fundamental supporters and policy implementation carriers for the world-wide climate change governance. They are playing their roles both locally, nationally, and internationally. The forces of them will continue to grow, during the processes of whose fighting for their rights, voices, and positions, the change of the current international regimes are demanded. However, the processes to get there will not be radical but relatively more peaceful and moderate. Another wave of worldwide green revolution will highly possible in the coming years especially in developing countries, but this revolution will work as the start of the processes of the evolving ‘world government’ above the states level. NGOs, international organizations, multilateral institutions, in conjunction with the international and transnational are the driving forces for these processes. During these processes, the world governments especially those conventional or conservative forces in these governments will bring lots of obstacles in the way. The non-governmental forces thus gradually take the place of the world governments. The new form of ‘non-government’ above the states level is possible though it was generally considered as utopian thought by world-wide researchers. The possible scenario is that there are Asian Union, European Union, American Union, and African Union in conjunction with other cross-continental unions who are under the governance of ‘World Union’. As Mao said in the book ‘Selected Works of Mao Zedong’ that the reason to establish Communist Party is to finally eliminate the communist party, the reason to establish countries is to finally eliminate the countries, because the history is moved under the law of metabolism in social context Thus the establishment of the ‘World Government’ is reasonable and possible! 

　　

　　More and more local, regional, national NGOs will ally with UN centered international organizations, when the forces of them develop and accumulate to a certain level, it will transform, thus a much stronger and powerful ‘Earth Government’ will be established which can provide and achieve better and more efficient earth governance. During the processes there will be a lot power struggles between the world governments and the alliance of international organizations and their NGO networks, the processes will take rather long time (e.g. NGOs ally with UN, International Organizations, International civil society, Intergovernmental Organizations), in a word, if we take all these nongovernmental alliances as a collective whole which includes NGOs, civil society, IOs and intergovernmental organizations, these forces will gradually take over the traditional governments, which will start a new era of human society, that is world anarchy but under the governance of a new form of ‘world government’ that is the alliance of UN and other IOs.

　　

　　Other findings:

　　

　　It was discovered that the primary contradiction in the 21st century is that the powerful production forces of humans and the limited resources of the Earth, which is that the survival of all humans and the ‘death threat’ as consequences of the climate change! Therefore, for the survival of all humans, all the other contradictions (contradictions between states, between the north and the south, contradictions between democracy and authoritarian regimes) should be subordinate to this primary contradiction.

　　

　　After this study, beyond this paper, I will define non-governmental forces as all the forces that do not belong to the pure governmental forces, which include NGOs, trans- and international civil society, forces of international organizations, forces of intergovernmental organizations, and these non-governmental forces will gradually replace the traditional governmental forces, in another word, governmental forces will gradually transformed into non-state-governmental forces, so that more effective and efficient earth system governance will be achieved by all these forces under the governance of the evolving ‘world government’.

　　

　　5.4 Reflections and Recommendations:

　　

　　In the context of early 20th century, the contradictions had been thought and treated as the primary aspect in the law of contradictions, but 21st century the unification will be the prevalent point of views.

　　

　　21st century, the first time ever though the history stand in the same ‘boat’ seeking for survival, maybe some big ‘guy’ in the ‘boat’ wants more food, water and space, he takes advantage of others or he unite his ‘friends’ to take advantage of others, maybe each one of these people in the ‘boat’ wants to go to different directions, but the direction is for survival, all the members on the ‘boat’ needs to help each other and encourage each other to work together and hard to paddle the boat forward, thus to help each other is to save all!

　　

　　Even though the call for a legally binding convention has been very high, but the decision power is still in the hands of world government, especially those big powers, and there are still lots of contradictions between the world governments, e.g. the North and the South, the West and the East, the conventional big powers (America) and the new big powers (China) and the power race among EU, America, China, India, and so on. The EU has been the leader in the field of the environmental protection, sustainable development, and the climate change science, America doesn’t want to be number two, in the aspect of addressing the climate change challenges, America also need to collaborate with countries all over the world, thus if America could contribute more in Mexico, the neighbor of America, it is highly possible that America could get more national benefits, e.g. the credits of getting more support from the world governments, to wash away the shadow of financial crisis and fighting two wars at the same time. In the aspect of climate diplomacy, China also doesn’t want to fall behind, in fact, this year 2009 China has surpassed America and is already the largest investment country in clean energy (Pew Report, 2010). Climate Change has grown to the extent as one aspect of the current primary contradictions, it seems that climate change issues is gradually more centralized, thus addressing sustainable development issues will be wakened, it shouldn’t be thought like this, because to address sustainable development is to address the climate change issues.

　　

　　In the aspect of reforming the international organizations, both the success and failures of EU has strong implications to UN (Note: EU attracts much more budget than UN, it is because the democratic approach of decision-making that make all the members feel that their interests are cared by the EU, but the decision making power of UN was strongly controlled in the hands of those limited number of the member of Security Council which made the larger number of the members of UN feel that they are marginalized and their voice are not important, in attracting financial support, UN could return the fees paid by the members in the way of investing back those budgets in respective member countries), well the core issues is if the world powers are willing to grant more power to the UN. But the historical trend is positive, because the 21st century is the century of multi-polar instead of being one state hegemony, and America can not afford working as the world police addressing contradictions between world states in the long run, however, the way to get there will not be easy since there will a lot of contradictions evolved out need to be addressed. The new wave of regionalization will also undermine the America Hegemony. Secondly, if America can’t continue to work as world police, an organization beyond the states level is need to secure the peace, thus America will have possibility to finally agree to grant UN more power (the other western countries will follow America and also agree to grant more power to UN), for establishing a power sharing regime, inter-regional alliance e.g. BRIC (China, India, Russia, Brazil) are also willing to grand more power to UN (other developing countries will do as these powerful developing countries since they’ve being longing for that their interests be expressed by a stronger and more powerful UN).  In the aspect of reforming the Security Council, maybe more permanent seats are needed to take the place of the ‘big five’, though it will be very hard to decide, e.g. EU does not have a single voice towards UN and the world (France and Germany, China and Japan also have historical issues), and there are new rising powers who also demand to have a seat.  

　　

　　In 21st century, security of earth citizens is the top priority, the climate change is threatening the survival for humans, and the conflicts between states seem will never come to an end, e.g. since America is fighting two wars at the same time, thus Iran and North Korea take this great opportunity to develop their nuclear plans. And so many other crises and challenges, for the survival of all citizens on Earth, a more powerful world ‘non-government’ is strongly needed for protecting all the existing countries.

　　

　　The global economy will continue its unification, security second because of global terrorism and crimes, environmental security will gradually have more and more weight in the future’s unification of politics, but the unification of politics will be most difficult and it will takes many decades, because all these three aspects concern most to the survival of all humans.

　　

　　The assumption of a new form of Earth Government:

　　

　　People from every corner of the world are called Earth Citizens, who enjoy freedom (to travel, to migrate to any parts of the world, people from different races freely marry each other without prejudice), equality, and democracy under the world government. People in general adapt and follow the universal values and norms. People from different nations are all willing to work together with each other since we are all earth citizens. Under the so-called ‘Earth Government’, any radical approaches should be abandoned but more moderate and peaceful approaches be applied instead to address the contradictions, all the earth citizens enjoy the peace forever.

　　

　　People all over the world only use one kind of currency, thus lots of unnecessary costs could be avoided, and e.g. people buy and sell electronically through an automated global computer network.

　　

　　People all over the world share those ‘belong to all humankind heritage’, the fresh and clean air, the green forest and beautiful landscape, international airspace, Antarctica, and so on, to use the Earth resources based on universal agreement, thus those misuses of land, water, ocean resources will need to be face by sanctions. To preserve these common resources is to save all Earth Citizens for survival reasons.

　　

　　References

　　

　　Empirical Response References:

　　

　　Prof. Bo Svensson. 2008, Nov.

　　

　　Prof. Bjorn-Ola Linner. 2009, Nov.

　　

　　Ph.D Mathias Friman. May 3rd.

　　

　　Prof. Sérgio Mattos-Fonseca ‘APREC Ecossistemas Costeiros (Coastal Ecosystems), April 22nd, 2010.

　　National Partnership Coordinator: Emily Adler, Alliance for Climate Education. April 28th.

　　

　　Literature References:

　　

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